Before I delve into the 80/20 rule and whether or not it’s right for you, we need to differentiate between which 80/20 rule we’re talking about. If you’re an economics major or work in the financial field, you’ve no doubt heard of the 80/20 rule otherwise known as Pareto’s Rule. It states that roughly 80%…
I came to a realization this morning. It may not have been a big one, but it struck me as worth sharing. That realization was this: every success story I’ve ever read or heard about started out with someone taking a dream and changing it into a goal. In that moment, when they decide they…
Do you remember… that kid in school that always wanted to sit next to you so he could copy your paper? Or your answers on a test? Were you that kid? Do you remember the guy you worked with who seemed to always copy your moves or changes or growth… whatever he saw you doing…
As I think a great many people do nearly every day now, I was surfing through some social media posts and I came across this image. Courtesy of @addicted2success, the image shows Superman in handcuffs and accompanied by four soldiers in body armor, etc. It’s an image from the movie “Man of Steel.” The phrase…
In the contemporary world there seem to be a host of beliefs, accepted as unavoidable fact, based on assumptions about the inevitable results of past events. The examples I would give are 1) Every combat veteran will have or does have PTSD and 2) If you have a family history of clinical depression then it’s…
One really spectacular benefit of social media is that it allows you to follow those you choose, ignore those you want to and share news or commentary on your day as you see fit. There are a great many people who use it purely for trivia or entertainment. There are many companies that use it…
Every now and then in everyone’s life we get distracted by things that we either cannot change or that shouldn’t matter to us to begin with. The distraction can cost us time, emotional energy, mental fatigue and more. To increase the quality of our life and the sense of serenity in our days, it’s worth…
This is something we all know, but some of us need a reminder about every now and then. You don’t measure your life by how long it is (although that’s no reason to desire less than a long life); you measure it by how much you’ve lived in the time span you’re given. Since none…
This entry is about living your life in excess but bear with me for a few moments as I share a story with you from my recent past. I was working at The Tiki Tobacco Barn – a name that may not make sense except that it was a cigar shop located on the property…
“Only a Sith deals in such absolutes.” Obi-Wan Kenobi. I couldn’t help myself. I had to open with that. The entire Star Wars franchise depicts the Sith as evil and selfish, so when I started thinking about these two words that express absolutes – always and never – I immediately attached them to “the Sith.”…
The term “Butterfly Effect” means different things to different people – or many things to each individual. Two movies come to mind when I read or hear “the butterfly effect.” First is the Ashton Kutcher movie of the same title that came out in 2004. The second is Jurassic Park (the first one) where in…
One of my all-time favorite motivational quotes is: “I WILL do today what others WON’T so that I CAN do tomorrow what others CAN’T.” What does that mean? Think about it a moment. It means that what we do today can either help us prepare to make greater accomplishments tomorrow or we can do less…
Have you ever considered the distinct difference between placing blame, finding fault and determining responsibility? They are surely all interconnected but they are also vastly different in leadership approach, critique for improvement and personal involvement in finding and enacting the solution. In a recent piece about Leadership and Management we identified several characteristics of leadership…
Any time you put an Army veteran and a Marine Corps veteran at a table together in a social setting you will get the inevitable “insults.” They aren’t serious. Every veteran knows the mutual respect that flows and we have a lot of fun with it by picking on each other. For all that, one…
There are many different kinds of energy, and that’s not even getting into the existential discussion about Einstein’s theory and how all mass is also energy. No, I’m talking about the energies each of us contains: physical energy, mental energy, emotional energy. We also have spiritual energy although some would argue that’s just a combination…
There’s an old joke about how some people are so stupid they would bang on their hand with a hammer just so they could enjoy how good it feels to stop. While none of us can imagine why anyone would voluntarily hurt themselves just so they could enjoy it when they stop, the “joke” does…
There is a running joke in my family regarding this old and common event: Someone loses something (like their keys.) They spend some time looking and other family members notice. Finally, they find their keys (as the example) and someone will ask, “So did you find what you were looking for?” All too often the…
Almost daily you can hear someone complain about their life, their day, some part of their job or something else. The commonality across their statements is that something is wrong somehow and they’re not happy. Stop and take a minute to consider what they’re complaining about and most often you can recognize a common cause…
Each of us… every single one of us knows what it’s like to fall down. We’ve done it. It’s not something we can “relate” to because we’ve seen someone else do it. It’s something we’ve done: as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, as a middle aged individual and (unfortunately) sometimes as…
Someone once said that there are two truly important days in our life: the day we are born and the day we discover what we were born for. That “what we were born for” could also be described as our purpose in this life. It’s something a great many people search for over a span…