We make countless decisions at all hours of the day, our work pulls is in one direction and our passions in another. Then we have families, chores, and many other responsibilities. These things build up, they leave behind a residue even after we take care of them. We need to clean that residue away.
It's a jumbled world where we confuse gratitude, praise, and flattery. There is a time for each, except flattery. Well, maybe flattery if you sell cars. It's difficult to distinguish the two and it requires practice.
The path of success and leadership lies not in compromise but convergence. The only way to find this convergence is to let go of your own ambitions, and find a new, shared goal that incorporates everyone's strengths and desires.
Taking three months of writing and other projects was good, but now it's time to ramp back up. Dealing with the failure of a startup, the expectations unfulfilled, and overcoming fear to find new allies.
Atlassian, the software company that makes JIRA, held a conference where a senior employee committed yet another offense that drives women from tech. What could they do better in response?
I recognized how mindless my coffee ritual was, then realized it was representing most of my life. I wanted to break out of the repetitive, unenriched existence and step into something better. Studying my coffee brewing while reading the final habit from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People did the trick.
More research is pointing to a loss of empathy, getting worse over time. This trend will be damaging to all of our efforts to decrease discrimination and exclusionary behaviors in the tech sector. I'm not sure how I can help, but the best way is starting with my own kids.
I quickly react to ideas, often hurting the final product. If execution is everything, and ideas are worthless, why are the end results not good enough? It's because that sentiment is wrong. Cultivating a great idea takes time, and this is my method for ensuring I'm patient enough for that to happen.
Obstacles inevitably arise as we progress towards our goals. Rather than get discouraged, or worse, burn myself out attempting to overcome them I wanted to shift my perspective. Now with a simple 3 step technique I've managed discovered that best opportunities arise from obstacles.
Sometimes we are compelled to build instead of buy. We call it the Not Invented Here Syndrome, and it both launches and destroys businesses. Where does this desire originate and is it constant? I don't think so, and I think that we can trigger it based on research from Dan Ariely and other social economists and psychologists.
I've revitalized my days, given myself focus and purpose. It was surprisingly easy, I just had to start each day by answering 3 questions. On any given day, it takes me about 5 minutes to finish this process. Those 5 minutes give me hours of happiness and productivity I wouldn't otherwise have.
As psychologists reveal more about how we make decisions, some surprising (and unsurprising) results have been delivered. I want to make the best decisions I possibly can, so this research is important to me. I think that with the combination of default options and trust in others we can save our energy for the decisions that really matter.
