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A Hiring Parable

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A hiring manager and a human resources person are discussing candidates for several open positions. HM: I’m thinking about assembling a work team, and these are the guys I want to bring on board. I’ve already spoken to each one, and I know I’ve got a winning team here. HR: Well, let’s take a look at your shortlist. HM: The first one is a fellow named Peter. HR: I see…hmm…according to the results of his preliminary screening, he’s rather impulsive. Tends to shoot off his mouth a bit, acts impetuously— HM: Yes, I realize that. But I’ll turn him into…

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What Ruins Photography Tell Us about Relationships

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The other day I was poking around on the Internet looking at what is sometimes called “ruin p*rn”—photographs of houses, buildings, amusement parks, and other man-made structures that have been abandoned and left to the elements. Some are well known, like Pripyat (Chernobyl) and parts of Detroit (Michigan Central Station), while others are well known only to those that know them well, like Okpo and Nara Dreamland. Neglect Leads to Crumbling Structures I find these ruins photos fascinating. These modern ghost towns speak to me not only as a remembrance of things past, but as a cautionary tale, a glimpse…

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Integrity: What Do You Do When Nobody’s Looking?

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It’s been said that integrity is how you conduct yourself when no one is looking. In other words, part of being an upstanding person is doing right because you know it’s the proper thing to do, and not because somebody is watching you, or you’re afraid of getting caught. An individual who has integrity is a person who can be trusted to behave honorably and not bring shame upon himself or others by engaging in unethical or immoral activities. Lack of Integrity: The Symptoms Most people have enough of a conscience to do right if they know that their actions…

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Investing Your Time Wisely

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Many of us lead busy lives. We feel like there is so much to do, and consequently it’s easy to believe that there just isn’t enough time for us to do all the things we’d like to do, or need to do. The hard reality is that everybody has the same amount of time—24 hours a day. That’s 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds every day. Some use this time to accomplish great things, while others just drift along and at the end of the day, they haven’t achieved anything except marking another X on their calendar. It’s not necessarily a…

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Discipline: Don’t Leave Home Without It

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Do you aspire to be successful? Most people do, regardless of their specific dreams or desires. It doesn’t matter how you define “success”—you know that it’s something you want. Everybody does. But if success is something most people want, why are there relatively few who seem to attain it? What is stopping so many from achieving success? What are they missing? In other words, what is a key component of success? Discipline. You need discipline if you want to get anything done. You need discipline if you want to achieve something. Great leaders achieve their successes through discipline. Click To…

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What Do You Do When You Lack Motivation?

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Motivation is a magical thing. It is necessary for anything you wish to accomplish. Yet there are undeniably times when your motivation falls far short of what you know it should be. What on earth do you do when you lack motivation? Can it be recaptured or rekindled? Consider some of the situations that could result in a lack of motivation. For example, perhaps you are “mismatched” to begin with. By that, I mean that maybe you are trying to pursue something that simply is not meant to be. Are you wasting time and energy by expending effort on something…

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What Motivates YOU?

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Have you really thought about what motivates you?  What makes you tick? What really trips your trigger? Of course, it depends on what we’re talking about here. What motivates you to go to your job each day is probably not the same as what motivates you to mow the lawn for your elderly neighbor. So, pick a particular task or activity and ask yourself the following questions: Why am I doing this? Ostensibly, the answer to this question will indicate what motivates you, but as we have seen previously, this alone won’t give you a complete picture. This only scratches…

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“I’d like a bottle of Motivation, please~”

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Do you find yourself lacking motivation? Do you wish you could just go to your favorite superstore and pick up an economy-size bottle of motivation? Ah, if only it were that easy. If only motivation were something that could be bottled and sold. Whoever could pull that off would be rich! Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. I’d like to explore with you the topic of motivation. But before we can answer the question about how to get motivation, we have to take a step back and ask a more fundamental question: What is motivation? Basically, motivation is…

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Life Lessons from a Furnace Repairman

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The other day—in the middle of the night, actually, on one of the coldest days thus far this season, with daytime highs in the single digits and windchills well below zero Fahrenheit—our furnace stopped working. It would fire up and blow unheated air for a minute or so, then quit before things had a chance to warm up. This was most disconcerting, not only because of the frigid weather, but also because the furnace was only a few years old, and there was absolutely no reason why it should malfunction. We went down to the basement and popped open the…

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On Writing Longhand.

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I like to write longhand. My preference is to use a fountain pen, but in many respects a fountain pen seems too lofty, too sacred, if you will, to be put to profane use. So, for mundane, everyday writing I utilize a pencil. In an age where computers are ubiquitous and schoolchildren are scarcely taught cursive—the rationale being that typing is a more practical skill for the digital age and people won’t need to write by hand anymore—the notion of writing longhand seems quaint, if not heterodox. Why bother? What’s the point? Isn’t it a waste of time, especially if…

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