I read, listen to podcasts, and pull from personal experiences to push my thinking in all areas of personal and team growth and development. The posts focus on my perspectives around the information I’m currently consuming. I hope these ideas and prompts are relevant to you and your personal development journey. Enjoy!
Vision for 70…80…90
When we think about who we will be at 85, what do we see? In a financial class I took recently, they mentioned four phases of retirement. Honeymoon. Go Go. Slow Go. No Go. There was something eye opening about this structure. Then, I heard a podcast that we...
Re-Imagining “Coming of Age”
I heard someone say that “coming of age” happens at many moments in our lives. Typically, the phrase is associated with the time we move from childhood to adulthood. A transition from one phase to another. Yet, there are many points in life that we make transitions....
Highlight Your Strengths
There are many situations when we want to highlight our strengths. Performance reviews. Job interviews. LinkedIn profiles. Resumes. Just to name a few. The challenge we often face is how to highlight our uniqueness without bragging. My Perspective I’ve come across...
Planting Seeds
I’ve covered the concept of planting seeds twice in the past – here and here. The first post was when I was introduced to the idea and the second tied to our careers. These followed the philosophy of this quote: “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by...
PodList & Summary – 4.6.24
Welcome to the Saturday recap. Enjoy! Personal Development This week, the posts don’t follow a theme. They cover topics on career development, the impact of daily habits, and how we sometimes forget the big picture. Learn / Earn / Return Cycle. This first post talks...
The Cost of Pseudo-Work
Back in 2007, I was out of school and working full time. Yet, I was struck by this post from Cal Newport about studying. The premise was that pseudo-work does not equal work. He used exponential decay theory and applied it to marathon study sessions. The data from the...
Personal Capital
This week, I started a year-long program focused on sustainability. A realization that is already occurring is that concepts about our planet can also apply to ourselves. One of the topics covered was the concept of “Natural Capital”. According to the United Nations,...
Day 500 – Marking a Milestone
Today marks the 500th day that I’ve started my day writing. A handful of days, the writing had to happen at a different time, but mostly it’s been the morning. The rules have been simple – one page a day on personal development topics. About 325 of the posts...
Systems Thinking
We’ve all heard of systems thinking. This approach to problem solving considers both the overall system and the individual parts. The concept has been used for years in science, engineering, leadership, and more. My Perspective I think systems thinking is underused at...
Learn / Earn / Return Cycle
There is a framework that is credited to Jack Balousek, former president of True North Communications. He said there are three phases of our life – the phase when we are learning, the phase where we take that learning and earn, and then the phase where we return what...
PodList & Summary – 3.30.24
Welcome to the Saturday recap. Enjoy! Personal Development This week, the focus is on resistance. We all face resistance when we are trying to move difficult projects or goals forward. The posts provide some thoughts and ideas to help you work through the...
Keep the Scar Out of Scary
Creative work is full of scary things. Sometimes we do scary things, and the outcome is positive. Other times, the scary event doesn’t turn out well. When things take a negative twist, “scary” can drop the “y”, and turn into a scar. That scar makes the thing we did...
Identifying and Combating our “Scaries”
Creative work is full of scary things. Really, any kind of work can be scary if you strive to change the status quo. Without roadmaps of “how it’s always been done” there is no certainty. My Perspective The less we know about a situation, the scarier it can be. There...
The Spiritual Side of Resistance
Yesterday, we focused on the scientific side of resistance. Resistance holds electricity back. Resistance is measured in ohms - Ω. Resistance transforms electric energy into heat energy. The energy doesn’t go away…it is transformed. My Perspective The summary above...
The Scientific Side of Resistance
Resistance has several meanings. In electricity, it’s the force that hinders movement of electrons. Like this: This is equation to calculate resistance: Resistance (measured in ohms - Ω) = Voltage (measured in volts - V) / Current (measured in amps – A) Voltage is the...