After most of my life valuing thinking about things and planning before doing, I’ve found acting first works better in many situations. And that thinking and theorizing inhibit getting things done. I’m not saying to act thoughtlessly. Everyone knows the problem with that. I don’t think everyone knows the problems with the converse: thinking without acting. The words of my teacher for my movement class when I took acting a[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “This Insidious (and Subtle) Innovation Myth is Killing Your Creativity,” begins: This Insidious (and Subtle) Innovation Myth is Killing Your Creativity This specious myth is so commonly held enough that few challenge it. Yet overcoming it is easy and rewarding. Thomas Edison was an outlier. For someone to invent so many products and succeed with so many, even accounting for his failures, just doesn’t happen,[…] Keep reading →

An Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, “What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us,” illustrated a perspective that will turn higher education into a dinosaur if it doesn’t learn some new perspectives. It begins COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities.[…] Keep reading →

If you read this blog, you know I care about leadership and how to improve yours—in business, personal, family, and every other part of your life. I presume you do too. As much as you’ve learned from the blog, you can learn more from doing. If you want to improve because you’re moving up the corporate ladder, just finished school, starting your own projects, or any other reason that you[…] Keep reading →

When my friend set up this blog page for me, I asked him how often he blogged. I expected him to say something like three days a week, weekdays, when big events happened, or something like that. Instead he said “Every day,” then adding: If you miss one day you can miss two. If you miss two, it’s all over. I took the practice to heart. Today finishes my fifth[…] Keep reading →

Some of the best ideas of my life have come to me while jet-lagged, lying awake in bed for hours before the sun rises. I end up having incredible ideas and thoughts but can’t act on them, so I let them flow, sometimes turning the light on briefly to write them, partly to remember them, partly to free my mind from trying to remember them so it can go on[…] Keep reading →

When I got home from traveling last week, I found myself returning to many patterns and habits that traveling forced me to suspend. As I’m approaching middle age, I started to wonder if I was getting set in my ways. I want to stay young, vibrant, and effective. Could these habits mean I’m ossifying and becoming sedentary? While I could look at it that way, I find that I’ve found[…] Keep reading →

Many people look to technology to solve problems. Technology has solved many problems. It helps us travel around the world, communicate with people anywhere instantly, makes amazing special effects in movies, and all that stuff that dazzles us. I think a lot of people see technology as something that sprouts out of laboratories or the minds of people so unlike them they call them geniuses and consider them superhuman. I[…] Keep reading →

Theater has been around forever even though people don’t attend performances that much. Most people I know see more paintings and read more books than they see performances on stage. Have you ever wondered … why theater has stood the test of time as an art so much? … why so many cultures have theater of some sort? … why Shakespeare ranks so highly among cultural icons? … why we[…] Keep reading →