Seventy-seven percent of people have some fear or anxiety around public speaking. That's three out of every four people that you pass on the street, think about that for second. How come? We speak all the time, most people would actually find it uncomfortable to go a day with verbal communication. With all of this experience and exposure, what is it that drives the anxiety most people feel. I think it comes from a few things. Fear Our societies are ones that praise success and punish failure. We validate getting the right answer. We feel safe when we are right, that we are accepted and that we fit in. Especially in the professional world, most people are terrified to look like they don't know something, or that they don't have the skillset for what is being asked. This preoccupation with fear is the root of the problem for most people. Judgement Since public speaking or presenting something to a group of people puts you in the spotlight, people anchor to the fact that the ...

    I'm writing today inspired by a post I saw by Chris Walker - on LinkedIn . It resonated with me personally and professionally. There is a dichotomy between having a vision and seeing what others don't while also needing their approval and trying fit in. We are often asked to solve problems and come up with new and innovating solutions to what we see in front of us. Rarely are you asked to implement a dated and by the book strategy, everyone wants to be on the cutting edge. Oddly enough, the more your ideas or approach differ from the status quo, from what the people within the organization has succeeded on, the harder it gets to take those new roads. It feels like most of time, people want you to take the same path and miraculously see something that no one else before you saw, hang a right and boom ... you are at your perfect oasis. Ridiculous.   Here's a fun list for you: Apple Tesla AirBnB FedEx KFC Evernote Blogger Amazon   Wondering what the list is about? A...

  I had an interesting experience the other night that level me surprised and questioning some assumptions. I saw an article on LinkedIn that was written to support route optimization and highlight differences between different types of final mile (last mile) deliveries. As I went through it, I couldn't help but feel like it was a little off. Not that the information was wrong per se, more that the frame didn't quite capture all of the nuances I felt it should (I appreciate I am a touch opinionated - I prefer to call it passion). It dawned on me later that evening, a question that might explain why I was feeling off after reading the article. In an on demand world, that is based on dynamic orders and routing, is knowledge being lost that supported the previous "traditional" models. The major difference I am making between dynamic and traditional models is that traditional models are/were built on fixed and planned service schedules. This could be five deliveries per w...

  Have you ever wondered why we get stuck on the concept of making the right or wrong decision?  Have you realized that thinking a decision either leads to the right path and that the other leads to the wrong one is binary? How limiting. I appreciate the picture for this post is exactly that; it was by design to re-enforce what most people go through when making decisions. We get stuck trying to settle on whether or not we should do a particular thing. This simple lens, while easy to process and helps us feel in control, usually results in a failure to consider other alternatives. Rarely are our choices black or white, yet we spend so much of our time trying to decide against one single thing. This is to to our detriment in two major ways.  First, we are limiting our our choices. We don't consider alternatives that could be equally rewarding and adequate to solve the problem. Second, causes us to miss out on the experience of trying and testing alternatives, which could l...

  A thought popped into my head the other day, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.  Why is modern philosophy so weak? That sounds full of judgement, clearly there are many modern day (and impactful) philosophers. A quick Google search this morning easily gave me a list of the top 50 living philosophers. Being able to generate a list of 50 people in 2 seconds seems to blow up my comment rather quickly. What is philosophy then? Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind and language. The questions are often posed as problems to be studied and resolved. With academic philosophy healthy and strong, I started to wonder where my feeling and original question came from. I am now considering that it is not modern philosophy that is weak, the reality is it handles more complexity and nuance in the topics it explores than every before, rather it is the general importance and interest it has with the g...

  Do you know what I did last week? This will sound crazy and you might think I need help (honestly maybe I do!). I have been struggling to manage my time and responsibilities lately. Not so much in terms of knowing what I need to do, more balancing what I need to do with what I want to do. What had been happening was that too many things were pushing off, "Oh, I'll get to that tomorrow" or I was allowing myself to think that "I don't have time for that". The consequence was that every few days, things would stack up and the biggest place that was suffering was my sleep. Now, I appreciate off the bat that might sound lazy AF to some people. Thinking "Is this guy really whining because he's not able to sleep ... come on dude". I get it, our society has created a culture around how much you can do on the fewest hours of sleep. I bought into that, big time ... hell I was captain of the team. At one point in my life I was flying 50-100 times a year...

  Leadership is not a title, and it is not only something reserved for your professional life. One thing that has greatly helped me over the years is finding what is the same rather than focusing on why situations are different. There will always be differences and nuance with whatever you are dealing with, I challenge however, that there is more that is similar or relatable to something else than what is different. True leadership is about how you react, how you handle the circumstances in front of you. True leadership is also how you carry it. For every decision, position or action that you see publically, there are two to four times more that most people never see. Professionally or personally we all carry a lot, we are all going through something all the time. Being a leader means that you have to do more. It is your responsibility to still take care of your team, your peers, your friends, your family. You have to be a guiding light, a steady hand, a source of confidence and co...

  I'm worried I was a downer last week. I spent time writing about working, this idea of "make work your passion". I blew that up a little bit (especially if you followed more of my daily posts on LinkedIn), maybe I left a few people sad, depressed and disillusioned. This post will approach things from a different way, I'll also highlight my personal challenge with the whole dream of making your work and your passion the same. From my previous post last week, I much prefer the concept of optimizing your work around your interests. Here is the biggest part of the challenge for me when talking about work being your passion: pas·sion /ˈpaSHən/ Learn to pronounce noun 1. strong and barely controllable emotion. "a man of impetuous passion" Yes ... that's the dictionary definition, I didn't have to fall too far from the tree to find the problem. A strong and barely controllable emotion. Wow. If you step back and think about it for a second, anything that w...

  I'm sure seeing the title made some people cringe. Are these not some of the biggest buzzwords over the last 5 years? On one hand, I am sure a lot of people are frustrated with the avalanche of "self-improvement advice", I am sure that there are feelings of aren't I already enough? Am I not already good enough. You are 100% enough. That is not the point of this post. My hope in writing this is that it may help you appreciate how often we are our own barriers for the success that we want. Most of us have grown up and come through systems that promote the status quo. Most people will rationalize the status quo (even when it is in conflict with their own interests) as legitimate in order to fit in and be accepted. A popular frame for this is that it is done out of fear. That we fear the unknown, it lacks certainty so we do what we can to avoid it. The truth is you cannot fear something that you know nothing about. Your fear is coming from your perception of the unknown...

  Making decisions and getting consensus is the most common activity that every person goes through. Whether in your personal or professional life, we are all selling, all the time. Selling? I'm not selling anything! Actually, that's not really true. At the most fundamental level, selling is about the transfer of belief. You are trying to get a person or a group to see things the way you do. If they accept that, you make the "sale" (i.e. you have transferred your idea/belief) as another has chosen to accept it. Where things get hard is when people hold onto certain ideas, frames or positions around a circumstance. It's interesting how little people realize what they share related to their position without even knowing it. The information is there, as long as you are listening. Always be listening. When someone repeats a variable or constraint that is a difference, that has major impact. They themselves they may not realize that they are essentially confirming what...

   How many times have people told you the best thing to do is make your job something you love? Easy right, just go out, get hired into a role that speaks to you professionally and personally, love life and be happy. Reality? Not anywhere near that easy. That dream is out there an exists, however it is probably one of the hardest things to define, find and then actually make happen. I am not sharing that to discourage you, far from it, if you follow my writing here and on social you know that I constantly encourage people to push themselves to do the things they want to do. The point of the post is to support you until that happens. We all need to work, maybe you don't have everything completely figured out yet, so what do you do until you do? Or maybe you will never be one of those people that has one burning passion that you can turn into your life's work, and that's more than okay too. If you don't have that passion, what do you do then? Follow your interests, follo...

  While reading today, I came across the following comment: Is a high service level necessarily bad? No. However, if your service levels do not vary by type of customer or if your customers are not willing to pay for better service, you are potentially over servicing your customers. Our experience across industries shows that companies seldom segment their service offerings, thereby allowing all of their customers access to the same high level of service. While working in the food industry, responsible for the organization's direct delivery (B2B), this topic was an area that we started to explore more and more.  One comment from a former peer who I respect greatly was that, in logistics, you can do anything as long as you are willing to pay for it. This was true then and it remains true to this day. As you begin to optimize and improve your operations, you soon realize what you are actually providing to customers. You look at what you have to do, what your processes are, what ...

 There are two streams of thought when you start reading a book and you don't feel like you are connecting with it. Some people will say to stop reading it and move onto something else, the theory is that there are so many things in the world that you will enjoy reading, that you shouldn't be wasting your time on things that you don't. Camp B will tell you to stick with it, get through it and see what happens. If I had to "pick a side" I probably fall more into team B than team A, even though I do feel that there will always be some books / material that you should just put down. What has me more B than A? Some of the books that have had the most impact on me were a STRUGGLE to get through. I challenge that this may because they are pushing your boundaries and putting something up against your current worldview / paradigms. True growth and learning comes from when you can challenge and dismantle your own ideas, and rebuilt them anew. My first real experience with ...

  2022 is upon us and I have decided to pick back up with my writing ... resolutions, gotta love them. The quote above is overly dramatic, however this post was inspired by Dr. West. One of the biggest success factors in my career has been asking questions. That may sound simple, however you will see as you progress through your career the amount of people that don't ask questions. They would rather guess, figure everything out on their own, or hope that they correctly understood from the start (rarely happens when you aren't able to ask good questions). In the opening of his Master Class, Cornel West frames a philosopher in the following context. I've been blessed to teach philosophy for 44 years. And in each one of my classes, I tell my students, you have come in this class to learn how to die. And they say, oh, Professor West, I thought I was just here to get a grade and try to get my degree. No, no. That's just the professional, formal dimension of it, because dying...