We need to seriously talk about you taking a vacation

Take A Vacation You Overworked Mess

In 2014, Americans left about 430 million vacation days on the table. For context on that, let’s assume a workday is 10 hours. That means 4.3 billion hours were left on the table, basically. You could drive from New York City… Continue Reading

1

The personal question my wife asked me that I can’t answer (and what it means)

I originally wrote this back in March ’15, but I decided to repurpose it a little bit because of recent events. The Original Story It’s been snowing/freezing raining in “The Metroplex” of Dallas-Fort Worth since basically about Tuesday, so this… Continue Reading

Start thinking about “connectional intelligence”

Connectional Intelligence

Basically, networking sucks — to the point that often the best advice to “network better” is actually to “stop networking.” There are a myriad of reasons for that, not the least of which is networking feels like a game that can… Continue Reading

1

Maybe funny is the new sexy

Make Your Partner Laugh

97% of single women consider having a sense of humor just as important as physical attractiveness these days, eh? Nice. Continue Reading

Move from “storytelling” to “story-making” in your branding and marketing

Storytelling vs. Story-Making

Goes something like this, I think: Old idea: Everything comes back to storytelling; that’s what the brain resonates around. If you’re in marketing, that’s what you should do. That’s essentially the keynote of most every marketing conference since 2009, and… Continue Reading

If you’re an idiot, you probably think you’re a genius

Kruger Dunning Effect and Incompetence

Cue it up: This finding was not a quirk of trying to measure subjective sense of humour. The researchers repeated the experiment, only this time with tests of logical reasoning and grammar. These disciplines have defined answers, and in each… Continue Reading

How “the latitude of acceptance” explains change at work

Latitude of Acceptance

Here’s how to conceptualize the idea of a “latitude of acceptance.” Take any idea that has two distinct sides. There’s a cluster of people all the way at one end (“Abortion is terrible!”), then a cluster of people all the way… Continue Reading

1

Senior business leaders mostly fear incompetence. Cue the trickle-down.

CEOs facing fear

Cool story here on “what CEOs are afraid of,” based on data from 116 CEOs and other executives (including 27 in-depth interviews afterwards). 116 isn’t a lot of people by any means — there are over 2 million CEOs/top executives in… Continue Reading