This is an essay from my popular 100 Days of Leadership Series. If you would like to learn how to become a leader in your organization, your community, or in your personal life, sign up here to receive these short essays directly to your inbox. Become the leader, before you are ever chosen. The chosen leader is someone who…
Tag: Opportunity
Third-Order Thinking
This is an essay from my popular 100 Days of Leadership Series. If you would like to learn how to become a leader in your organization, your community, or in your personal life, sign up here to receive these short essays directly to your inbox. Third-order thinking is the Mount Everest of cognitive performance. It’s a climb few people…
Run the Extra Mile
Don't just go the extra mile. Run. It was 3:00 in the afternoon on a chilly February day. Tryouts for the 7th grade baseball team were just about to start and I was eager as ever to put my skills to the test for the first time. In those days (circa 2004), to try out…
The Digital Gold Rush Is Near
If you’ve ever dreamt of starting your own business, start building it online now, before the gold rush ensues. The gold rush was a common occurrence during the 19th century. From North America to South Africa to Australia, miners came in search of gold and in search of fortune. But at the heart of it,…
Print Your Own Golden Ticket to Success
What stands between you and your golden ticket to success isn't lack of opportunity, but the lack of action when opportunity presents itself. To live well, you must be willing to make the hard choice. And often, the hard choice is deciding to get out of your own head, getting off the couch, or getting out…
Disrupting Higher Education
I’m calling it now: I’m not sending my future kids to college. Instead, they will learn useful skills they enjoy, identify problems, and build solutions through online businesses to solve those problems. Instead of burying themselves in soul-crushing debt, they will be building a better world, with a four-year and debt-free head start. This is…
Standing Out at Work: Solve the Principal-Agent Problem
If you’re looking for a hack that will put you on the fast track to success at work, I have something for you. You might not like it. You might hate it. You might even despise it so much that you do the opposite. But sometimes we all must take our medicine and do what…
The Power of a Forcing Function: How A Plane Ticket Transformed My Life
Booking the flight was my forcing function. There was no time to regret what I had just done. There was no time to reason myself out of it. There was no time to give fair warning to family and friends. I just had to do it. So I took what I had: time constraints, money…