A couple weeks ago I delivering the opening keynote at an agricultural conference. For those of who don’t know, theirs is an industry currently facing significant challenges. A combination of unusually uncooperative weather and unprecedented policy decisions have simultaneously depressed crop supply and prices. Farming is a difficult business, and farmers today are having a…
In honor of this being the month of Halloween, we are going to discuss how to handle ghosts. Not the spooky, incorporeal kind – the best way to handle that kind is by screaming and running away, unless of course you have a plasma cannon calibrated for the proper ectoplasmic frequency, and I’m guessing you…
One of the most important skills a leader needs to develop is the ability to articulate a vision that employees can attach to and rally around. (Indeed, the word ‘vision’ is such a common part of leadership education that I wouldn’t be surprised if you occasionally have visions about creating a vision.) Having a strong…
Meeting new people is a pain. Not that new people are inherently annoying (although some of them are), but figuring out how to meet them is exhausting. Of course you’re interesting and fun and charismatic and you smell great too, and if you could just start in the middle of the relationship, everyone would realize…
Every summer I completely understand why tropical countries tend to move at a slower pace than ones further from the equator. Of course the Vikings went on raiding expeditions – what else were they going to do during nine months of Nordic winters? I live in Michigan, where we only get six months of decent…
I just got the results back from my first personality assessment, and guess what? I’m Intuitive! I’m also a Planner, and I’m Conflict Averse. I knew that last one, ever since my MMA career ended before I ever began training for it, but it was a surprise to learn that I like having things organized…
When I was a high school teacher, I had a 15-year-old Kurdish student in my 9th-grade English class. He was a terrible student, constantly disrespectful and disruptive, completely uninterested in learning, and a huge challenge to my newly-minted teacher self. I spent far too much time trying to stop him from derailing my entire class,…
Tech companies get a lot of attention for offering some crazy awesome perks to their employees. Google has on-site masseuses, and Epic Health Systems has a building with a three-story slide in it and another one designed to look like a Dungeons & Dragons game. In fact, these types of perks have gotten so much…
In my Uncrapify Your Future! keynote, I talk about one of the biggest paradoxes of modern work – namely, that productivity doesn’t always look productive. We are accustomed to valuing things we can see, like typing on a computer or turning a wrench, and so we are often far less impressed by things that don’t…
By now I’m sure you’ve had somebody tell you to follow your passion. There are entire TED talks, by (inexplicably) respected speakers, telling people that the secret to life is to find what makes you happy and then build everything else around that. They say it blithely, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.…