Author: admin

Why is it so hard to change your behavior, even when you know the right thing to do? Because your brain isn’t in control. The wiring of your nervous system determines your actions. One of the biggest misconceptions about behavior change is that information or knowledge is the key to change. If I only knew…

What is excellence? In his new book, The Way of Excellence, Brad Stulberg makes the case that excellence is not merely excelling at an activity, but a biological imperative that is also a knowable feeling. “Excellence is less a destination and more an energizing process of growth and becoming — an ongoing path that yields…

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” This may be a cliche, but it describes one of the core skills of leadership: Matching people to work that is aligned with their skills and instincts…

People think expertise is about doing and learning more and more. But often it’s about focusing ever more intently on the basics. Continuing the theme of my previous post of life lessons of skiing, I have been mostly skiing with my kids for the past few years. I haven’t been skiing the deep powder or…

You don’t improve by avoiding mistakes. You improve by getting the reps in. I’m skiing a lot with my kids these days, and it’s amazing how fast they are improving. What’s interesting is that they don’t need a lot of instruction to get better – they just need time on the slopes. They can feel…

I was honored to be interviewed by Lisa Nicole Bell on her Behind the Brilliance podcast, a long-form interview for the intellectually curious and relentlessly ambitious. She drew out several aspects of my career journey that I had never shared before, including: — the challenge of letting go of previous identities when pivoting your career —…

Our conscious brain is limited to processing 20-30 bits a second. I learned this startling fact 30 years ago when I was reading The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders. And yet we perceive about 12 million bits/second from our senses (10 million from our vision alone). How could we possibly be conscious of what’s going on…

When things aren’t going the way we want, we can stay silent and resentful and hope things will magically change. Or we can speak up and share what we want to be different. Early in my career, I took the former approach. It was the manager or the VP or the CEO’s job to make…

You can’t learn great leadership from reading a book. You learn it by training your body. That might seem counterintuitive, because there are thousands of books on leadership. But if great leadership was something you could learn from a book, then how come great leaders are so rare? I often compare leadership to a physical…

Giving more requirements and context can actually increase autonomy. Many managers think that autonomy means complete freedom to do whatever you want. They delegate a task to somebody on their team, give them full autonomy, and think they’re being a great manager because everybody wants autonomy. But then the task comes back and it’s not…