Good leaders know that you’re only as strong as your team. Businesses thrive or fail based on your team’s ability to execute the organization’s mission and goals with skill, precision, and passion. Companies today lob everything from free gym memberships to unlimited vacation days at their most qualified applicants. But putting the right people in […]

Steve Jobs was a virtuoso. Using technology and design, he changed the way we think about computers, phones, music, and movies. Tim Cook, by contrast, comes off as a boring technocrat. Jobs’s chosen successor as CEO of Apple is good at keeping the global supply chains for the company’s products going, which sounds like great […]

“How’s it going?” The query sounds warm and innocuous enough coming from a friend or sibling. But to an early-career employee the boss just-two-minutes-ago assigned a task, it can be a stark signal that you’re probably working for a micromanager. The greeting often conveys that you’re answering to an OCD-ish, down-to-the-minute-details kind of boss, one […]

Building an internal culture that loves a challenge is not just a good thing for businesses to do. It is actually essential if that company is going to grow. Employees that are never pushed or challenged grow bored, and surveys have reported that a stagnant work environment is the number one reason that workers look […]

Creativity is not some remote and solitary island. Each day, from the studios of legendary visual effects outfit Industrial Light & Magic to the conference rooms of ad agencies to the mission control rooms of NASA, teams of people come together to conceptualize, develop, and realize innovations in everything from movies to public policy. Yet […]

Calendars are the lifeblood of business operations. They always have been and always will be. One of the most common observations of successful businesses (and individuals) is they are very highly organized and have a consistent procedure. A 2017 study by PMI found that only 60% of projects actually meet their goals. The primary cause […]

The best and most creative thinking and problem-solving can only take place during uninterrupted periods of time. You know it and so do your colleagues. Which is why your company wants to give everyone time one day a week—let’s say Thursday—to work alone. Easier said than done. It is difficult to control the array of […]

Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek is an enormously popular book, selling more than 1.35 million copies since its 2007 release. But that doesn’t mean its message on how to “escape the 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich” sinks in right away. While Daniel Ndukwu, founder and CEO of software company Kyleads, was an early […]

Personal growth comes from self-awareness, and the practice of journaling is a phenomenal way to start that process with regular reflection—as long as your reflection is accurate. If you’ve ever been to a playground or circus with fun mirrors, you know the slightest bend to a mirror creates a distorted image that reflects your image […]

I started journaling a little over a year ago. It has become a regular part of my morning ritual. It has helped me clarify my thinking, process my feelings, and make better decisions.

However, like most people, I struggled with consistency. I wanted to journal. I was convinced of the benefits. But I found myself blowing it off with increasing frequency.

Sound familiar?

Several months ago I stumbled onto something that solved the problem. Not one hundred percent of the time, but most of the time.

Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. It seemed too simple.

But I shared it with my wife, Gail, who was struggling with consistency herself. After successfully using it for a few weeks, she said, “Honey, you have got to blog about this.”

Click here to read the whole post. Better yet, subscribe to to my e-mail newsletter and get my updates delivered to your inbox.

Charley Kempthorne has been keeping a journal for more than 50 years. Every morning before the sun is in the sky, the professor-turned-painter carefully types out at least 1,000 words reflecting on his past, his beliefs, his family, even his shortcomings. The prolific fruits of his labor reside in an impressive storage facility in Manhattan, […]

Studying the history of paper, as I did while writing the book Paper: Paging Through History, exposes a number of misconceptions. The most important of which is this technological fallacy: the idea that technology changes society. It is exactly the reverse. Society develops technology to address the changes that are taking place within it. To […]

If you ever attend Milan’s Design Week—a sweeping furniture fair, art festival, and Prosecco-soaked party that takes over Italy’s financial capital each April—you will need several essentials to fit in with the global trendsetters in attendance. First, your glasses. This is a design crowd, so the options are polarized into two camps: ultraminimal frameless spheres […]

One of my earliest memories involves a handwriting struggle. My class had been tasked with writing stories. I love stories. My masterpiece, about accidentally catching a great white shark and putting him into my bedroom aquarium, was the longest in the class. It was pages and pages long. It had chapters. I was in child-heaven […]

When the conversation turned to his status as the first American to hold the much-coveted WBC World Heavyweight Championship belt in eight years, no one would’ve batted an eye if Deontay Wilder attributed the achievement to his considerable skill and punching power. Instead, the former Olympic bronze medalist boxer explained, “When one guy is doing […]

Whenever I have the opportunity to speak in front of a group of leaders, I often ask them to recall the greatest leaders they’ve ever worked with. I love not only listening to their great stories but seeing how quickly people can understand what great leadership looks like. By now, I’ve probably heard thousands of […]

Lieutenant Norman Dike froze in the face of fire. Dike led Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne, during the wintery attack on the Nazi-occupied town of Foy, part of the overall Battle of the Bulge during World War II. He was a replacement officer who’d allegedly been sent down from higher offices to receive some […]

Consider some famous names from the business world in recent years. Bernie Madoff. Ken Lay. Bernie Ebbers. What do they all have in common? One thing is that they each demonstrated a tremendous failure of character. They acted viciously with no signs of a moral compass, and as a result, they destroyed their companies and […]

“I knew it was a fake check,” she said. “But if I didn’t come up with the money, we were going to lose our car.” In more than two decades in law enforcement, this one case still stands out in my mind. Angelique was a wife, mother, and by all accounts, a good person with […]

Julius Caesar Watts memorably said that “character”—meaning good character—is about “doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.” Watts would know a lot about people looking on. From the Oklahoma Sooners to the Canadian Football League to a Baptist pulpit and on to elected office, at both state and national levels, and then back into the private […]

If you want to understand how hard it can be to automate, consider the many attempts to replace cashiers with self-checkout systems. To wit, CVS pharmacies were once lousy with self-checkout systems, which I personally tried to use, many times, to get out the door faster. Almost every time, some loud error sent me to […]

It started with my first day on the job. I’d just been named senior leader at a growing organization with a generously-sized staff. Yet there were problems, as there are in any institution, and I was determined to solve them. All of them. Right away. Communications was a weak point, so I decided to personally […]

The question prodding us to increased productivity is almost never, “How do I fit more work into my day?” That question leads to productivity “hacks,” an exhausting pace of work, and endless to-do lists that never completely get done because there are only so many hours in the day. A better question to ask, instead, […]

Back in early 2007, I faced an interesting choice. By just about all accounts, I was doing great as an international sales director for a stable infomercial company. I had a family, a house, a car, and all the boxes that we check. But something felt off. I had the energy for something I couldn’t […]