Following up yesterday’s example of how one person created success out of what others might consider disaster or failure: Johnny Depp used telemarketing to transform a floundering music passion into one the top trajectories in acting today. To people in the rat race, who blindly accept other people’s values for themselves, resorting to telemarketing would suck. They’d probably say their lives were disasters and be depressed. People who didn’t blindly[…] Keep reading →

Life has challenges. Successful people succeed anyway — not because they have easier lives, but for knowing how to handle challenges. They know how to use unexpected or undesired situations to improve their lives. Successful people make their lives great. You can too. In particular, you can learn from their successes. An interview of Johnny Depp on Inside the Actors Studio revealed some of how he succeeded. Depp is one of[…] Keep reading →

Someone I’m coaching wrote the following: I will be graduating from college in May, and I am trying to decide which two cities I should move to after graduation. I’ve been wanting to move to NYC ever since I first visited in high school and been going there ever since. On the other hand, everyone that I know tells me that I should move to LA instead and think I[…] Keep reading →

Professor, author, and former former Chief People Officer at Pepsi, among other impressive feats,  Michael Feiner said one of the most valuable statements I’ve ever heard about why we choose, like, and don’t like our jobs. People join good projects and leave bad management. It’s one of the most valuable lessons I learned in business school. It applies to a remarkable number of situations — nearly every time I’ve heard[…] Keep reading →

Here is a mental exercise I like and find effective in learning to empathize and understand people better. It costs nothing and requires no preparation, but it can be personally challenging, but it develops you as a person. The exercise is to see how diverse behavior in others you can explain without relying on saying someone else has different motivations than you do. The more you can explain their behavior,[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I wrote about an alternative model for solving problems to the prevalent model that you need to find and solve their root causes to be effective. The alternative — the burning building model to solving problems — says that if you can think of something that will improve the situation, acting on it will help. If you’ve used the dandelion model for a long time, you may believe it[…] Keep reading →

Many people have a counterproductive yet common model for solving their problems. If you use it, you’re holding yourself back from a better life. There’s an alternative, however, which I’ll write about below too. The Dandelion Model I call it the “dandelion model” because it’s based on the idea that to get rid of a dandelion, you have to get to its roots. If you don’t, it will grow back.[…] Keep reading →

Continuing the theme on flexibility in your beliefs giving you freedom, contributing to your intelligence, and attracting people, I’ll continue about ways to increase that flexibility. Yesterday covered using a prevalent ad campaign to help develop non-judgmental acceptance of other people’s beliefs and changing your own. By the way, by accepting other people’s beliefs, I don’t mean necessarily agreeing with them, just accepting that they have them and understanding them.[…] Keep reading →

I’ll build on yesterday’s post on changing your perspective to make it easier to change your perspective with a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. Airports around the world are full of an ad campaign that provide another great exercise in enabling changing your perspective. Flexibility in changing your perspective is one of the most important tools in changing your world, creating freedom for yourself, and in[…] Keep reading →