Use This Activity To Develop The Most Crucial Habits for Lifelong Success It’s a cool October night. One of those nights where the sun starts going down, coaxing people back into their houses. The type of night that is actually perfect when you are going to exercise and sweat. Moving through the subdivision is easy enough. You can chart a rectangular course to meet the distance requirement you have. In my case, I’m able to do one big loop to get in 5k of activity. Little did I know that the distance was going to be the easiest part of the night. Most people outside of the military have never heard of rucking. It seems absurd when someone explains it to you. Rucking, is a low-intensity exercise in which you add weight to your back while walking or hiking. But what makes this the best exercise you have never heard of? It creates a unique set of conditions and variables to play with. It challenges you mentally as well as physically. The Physical This part is easy to understand. It’s ...

 The Lost Art That Changed The World   People hear the word philosopher and this is what jumps to mind. Icons of the past that changed the world thousands of years ago. Brilliant thinkers that changed how everything was understood. Ideas that changed the course of history. This isn’t you. So you aren’t a philosopher. That statement is wrong. Completely wrong. Philosophy isn’t about a few brilliant thinkers. Philosophy is something that we can all do. Most of us DO do it when we aren’t drowning in the busyness we have built our lives around.     Philosophy is our ability to wonder. About life and everything in it The goal isn’t to come up with answers. The real intent is this: It’s about the process of trying to find answers versus accepting without questioning. The most important ideas in your life will come from your own individual reasoning. They will not come from what has been forced upon you by society.     The beginning of thought is in disa...

 Building Habits In One Area of Your Life to Improve Others     Everyone knows that exercise is good for you. We are meant to move. The lifestyles that many of us lead today keep us glued to our chairs, in front of screens. I’m not sharing benefits for your body. This quick hit will share 6 qualities that will improve ALL areas of your life. The experiences we have, the habits we build, are not locked into the activity you developed them in. How you train yourself to behave or react in one situation will carry over to others. Running alone will allow you to build personally and triumph professionally.  [1] DISCIPLINE In order to achieve any goal, you have to take action. The biggest challenge people face is keeping themselves accountable. All too often we quit at the wrong time.  The world is full of distractions. Our mind is loaded with resistance.  Build your inner strength by sticking to a routine not giving up when things are hard. [2] CONSISTENCY...

 How My Focus on Writing is Influencing Everything For every year that has gone by, I have written more. You meet more people, attend more meetings, work on more projects and balance more commitments. To juggle all of those different activities, we communicate with each other more than we did in the past.  A lot more. It does people a huge disservice. And they don’t even know it. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. Jump-starting 2022 It’s cliche, but I decided that I was going to get back into writing. I had first picked it up when I left my job in 2019 and dove headfirst into the professional world of networking. My weapons of choice? LinkedIn and a personal blog. To step outside of my comfort zone and showcase my business prowess, I took to writing. I developed a strong habit of posting 1–3x a day on various industry news. My network was growing. Eventually, I let it drop off. I got busy with a new job and didn’t prioritize it. One day turned into ...

 How The Cold Calculated Choice Is A Dangerous Habit To Develop The bell just rang, the doors fly open and an avalanche of smiling faces come pouring out into the yard. It’s recess. There’s that period everyone goes through. Usually from grades 4 to 7 where you’re old enough to understand the world around you but young enough to still love to play. These are important formative years. I was an interesting mix growing up. I wasn’t an unpopular kid, but I wasn’t one of the super popular kids either. I was something else, somewhere in the the middle. I always had friends, did sports, wasn’t shy, and was smart enough to do well in school while also being able to play the slacker card. For the most part, things were good. The problem I had though, was that I was always bigger. Growing up a fat kid the 90s was less forgiving than what life is like today. Bullying was quite chic back then, borderline expected as part of growing up. But I was too popular to be bullied openly but not popula...

 How Managing Towards Perfection Makes You Excellent I’m walking up the steps to a set of glass doors situated at the corner of a small production plant. The stairs are much bigger than they should be. Wider. They create a sense of grandeur that doesn’t match the rest of the building. I open the doors and walk into the lobby. It wasn’t a lobby. It was a man trap — an unmanned man trap. There’s a phone with a contact list. I look through my phone and confirm the spelling of the last name of the person I am coming to meet. I call in and let them know I’ve arrived. Two people come out to greet me at the door. One is a coworker and the other is my new boss. I have taken a job as a distribution supervisor for a company in the food industry. Managing day-to-day delivery operations. You can imagine the type of fit this was for someone who graduated with a law and anthropology degree. This was a whole new world and I had no idea how any of it worked. The One Thing That My Career Success Is...

 Why Diversity Is As Important As Intelligence It was 2005. I had graduated university and was six months into one of the most entertaining jobs that I have ever had. I worked retail, like a lot of people in my situation. Working part time (or full time) while going through school was not uncommon. From 2000–2004 I worked at Staples. The store was fine. Pretty much what you see today when you walk into a Staples. A little bit less flashy, a lot more grey. Their bread and butter was business clients after all. I worked in the computer department. I'm sure that it had a special name, but I've long since forgotten that internal acronym. This was the start of the computer craze. The internet was drawing everyone's attention, every month there was a newer and faster computer released. Keep in mind, it was only in 1995 that Java was first announced; and by 1999 AMD was releasing the a 750mghz processor.  Impressive. With so much activity in the market, you can imagine customers s...

The Siren's Seductive Call of Self-Sabotage If you know anything about copywriting, you know there is one golden rule. Never, ever, make the customer feel like the problem is their fault. This article is going to break the rules. I'm going to agitate you. Get under your skin. I expect some of you will rage quit smashing that 'X' and putting down your phone. Some ideas need to be shared. Some need to be challenged (hard) if we want to achieve our goals. Rationalization is running rampant. People have never been happier to let themselves off the hook than they are today. It's not all your fault.  The self-help industry is estimated to be worth $11.3B dollars a year. There are two key sales strategies to sell at scale. Take away someone's pain, or help them get what they desire. Self-improvement hits people on both fronts, you barely have a chance against the psychological warfare. What's their number one seller? It's not your fault, you tried your best. Wh...

  People hate to fail. We drive ourselves crazy trying to avoid it. The irony however, is that we are natural experimenters. Our ancestors started roaming the planet about 6 million years ago, modern form humans back 300,000 or so, with civilization starting about 6,000 years ago. The constant through all of that has been trying out new ideas, methods or activities. Do you know what happens when we experiment? We get things wrong. If We’re Built for Experimentation, Why Do We Hate It? While failure comes with experimentation, it has an unfortunate connection to our fundamental needs. Originally developed in the 1940s, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us identify and rank core human requirements. Level one being were most of our trouble resides when thinking of failure. Biological and physiological needs — air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc. Our earliest memories set the stage for our future. We go to pre-school to succeed in kindergarten. From there we move through...

There was a point in my life when I prided myself on how much stress I could take. No matter what I was dealing with, I would take on more. It destroyed me. I have never been able to tolerate the same stress level since. I’m extremely thankful for that. Feedback is as gift that most people undervalue . No matter what you are doing, there is always a way to assess what is happening. Focusing on those cues, and developing my self-awareness has been vital to dealing everything in front of me. Cues These are personal. The patterns that I fall into are mine. We may share some, maybe even all of them, the point however is to identify the behaviours that are your response. These are some of my reactions to overload: Binge Eating This might seem obvious for you, it is for me as well. It is perhaps “more serious” for me. I used to be a lot bigger. Six years ago I lost a lot of weight and have been able to maintain my form.  I was successful because it came with a lot of understanding, a shi...

Building your Dreams with Commitments  I saw an interesting video earlier today from Patrick Bet-David. In 68 seconds he told the story of an interaction with his 8 year old son.  What is the difference between will and want ? His perspective was this. If we say we will do something, then we have to do it. If we say we want something, won’t don’t have to. How do you feel now saying you ‘want’ anything for yourself? That’s a heavy frame. It connected with another idea I came across recently. It was a similar juxtaposition, the difference between seeing something as an obligation versus an opportunity. Here’s the viscous cycle then that people fall into. What identify things that we want. These are our opportunities. Things that we would like to do or represent some ideal self to achieve. For some, they may be their dreams. Everyone encourages you to pursue your dreams. To go after whatever it is that you want, yet we are all ready to accept that it doesn’t have to happen. Count...

  Most interview questions these days are terrible. They are formulaic, repackaged and cliche. What's worse than weak interview questions? Being able to delight with scripted answers. This is the best question anyone has ever asked me in an interview. It was so different I was not even expecting it: What has been the most fundamental idea that has influenced your life? Some perspective. I work in Supply Chain. More specifically, logistics. The biggest part of my career has been in the last mile space (think Amazon to your door). I'm sure you can imagine why that interview question was not on my radar. Most interviews questions are technical, situational or aim to flesh out the environment. My answer? That most things are not as complex as people like to make them seem. I know what you're thinking. That answer sucks. Maybe it did. I didn't end up getting that job. That was the answer to the question. That idea has influenced my life more than any other. How Has That Been...

 Why You Need to Rethink Your Understanding Most people don't understand leadership. They relate it to a title or position. Leadership is not about power. You are not superior to others when you lead. Leadership is about people. I write a lot about leadership. It turns some people off. It is one of those areas that has been over-marketed. Every day you see people posting platitudes about it. It can get annoying. Who wants to learn leadership from someone unless they have done something great? The paradox is this. A lot of incredibly success people are terrible leaders. Some of the most amazing leaders are people that you will never hear of. Being a successful leader is not about arbitrary results. What one person considers successful, another will think it fell short. Real leadership comes down to how you shape other people. What is Leadership? This is the best way you should think about leadership: A process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of o...

 The Lost Art of Observation, Experimentation & Debate It’s 7:17pm on a Saturday night. You have had a brutal week. You’re behind on your project, your boss asked you to create a new report, an employee is out sick and you got nothing done because you attended 23 meetings in the last 5 days. You’re gassed. Sitting with a friend, having a beer, you start talking about how stressed you are wouldn’t be surprised if you were teetering on the brink of collapse. Instinctively, your friend reaches into their pocket pulls out their phone and jumps on Google. “What are the physical signs of burn out” Let’s go through the list and see how if you check the boxes. Rinse and repeat. For everything. All the time. The Value of Wonder Have you ever thought about what we have lost having the world’s knowledge at our fingertips? That question is the inspiration for this article, and quite possibly an ongoing series. I was out earlier today rucking, and that question dominated my thinki...

Content Creation and the Persistent Pressure to Perform   32, 083. T hat’s the number of posts being made to social media platforms every minute — of every day. The scary part? That number is ultra-conservative. I say that because it’s my own math.  4.62 Billion Active Social Media Users 1% of those users = Content Creators Each Content Creator posting 1x / day I’m comfortable that my opening number is too low. It better illustrates the point however, when even your minimum value overwhelms your capacity. The Frame I’ve been writing a lot in 2022. The other day I noticed that I have written more blog posts this year than I did in all of 2020 when I first started. A fun fact about 2020, I didn’t work a day job for half the year.  I’m not a professional writer. I don’t make money from this. I write because I enjoy sharing ideas. Add to this writing tied to my professional field on LinkedIn and my current Twitter experiment and I am writing a lot. The Lure of Likes...

 Are you living your own life or following someone else's compass? Here are three questions for you: What is your name? What is your quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? If you’re like most people, it was probably easy to answer two of those three questions. We all know our name, and a simple Google search can give us the other answer—twenty-four miles per hour. I saw that today and it spoke to me. There has never been more pressure to "get life right". From what we have been taught, to a culture that is focused on keeping up and the onslaught of social media - most people don't understand how they don't have it together while so many other people do. There are so many people in the world telling us what to do, who we should be and what is the right path it's easy to start living by someone else's rules. The challenge that I have seen and experienced with this is that most people come to the realization that they are living by other ...

 How Sales Techniques Make You More Effective at Any Job Do you ever get frustrated trying to get your point across? Struggle with great ideas stuck in your head? Answered yes to one of those?  Start learning about copywriting. Copywriting is the strategy of creating persuasive content for Marketing and Sales with the goal of generating conversions and sales. How does learning about marketing and sales techniques make you better at your job? We are all selling. All the time. Sales isn’t just transacting a product or service for money. In the simplest form, sales is the transfer of belief. You believe that you have the right answer, know how to fix something, have a better tool for the job. You want to get others to buy in —  re-framed, you want them to believe what you believe. People struggle in their lives, both professionally and personally because they don’t accept that we are always selling. Accepting this idea and using it to shape your interactions increases y...