What I Learned As CEO - WSJ.com

What I Learned As CEO - WSJ.com: "Leadership, particularly of people-intensive businesses, is also about knowing what you do not want or can't do and getting someone better suited for the job to do it. There is no shortcut."

iGoogle

iGoogle: "Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
- Edith Sitwell"

Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org: "Additionally, they can serve as a self-diagnosis of one's own capabilities and opportunities.

Here are the questions:

1. What is it that you really want to be and do?
2. What are you doing really well that is helping you get there?
3. What are you not doing well that is preventing you from getting there?
4. What will you do differently tomorrow to meet those challenges?
5. How can I help / where do you need the most help?

Let's briefly look at each question:

1. What is it that you really want to be and do? This question is about aspiration and purpose. The reason why someone is doing what they are doing should come out here. The question is also meant to get at the business goals and broader aspirations of an individual - someone wishing to be successful in business so that they can do more to help others, for example. The answer to question one should surface the driving passion of individuals - what is it they do or wish they could be great at doing?

2. What are you doing really well that is helping you get there? This question helps spotlight a core strength and the person's ability to execute towards his/her goal. What is someone naturally good at doing? Detailed and standardized oper"

The liberating effect of failure - May. 29, 2008

The liberating effect of failure - May. 29, 2008: "What else do successful rebounders do?

They create a new purpose. Many people think that prominent people rebound because they're wealthy and have access to resources and great connections - or luck. No, it's the conscious choices they make.

Who rebounded by crafting a new purpose?

Martha Stewart. She saw the frothing glee of people who wanted to bring her down, and rather than be frightened and chastened by that glee, it only motivated her more. She focused on defining herself by her future, her comeback.

What's the No. 1 reason business bigwigs fail to deal with failure properly?

They're afraid of looking weak. Everyone can learn from [JetBlue (JBLU) founder] David Neeleman, who has had the rug pulled out from under him a few times. He has the confidence to ask questions about how to do things differently. And he knows that if he's going to be a maverick, failure is going to be a cost. He's comfortable talking about his setbacks and he's proud of his Protean-like resilience.

Your parting wisdom, Jeff?

People who fail should feel liberated. They've already failed. Get over it! To top of page"

Don't Live in a Half-Built House - Peter Bregman - HarvardBusiness.org

Don't Live in a Half-Built House - Peter Bregman - HarvardBusiness.org: "David McClelland, a Harvard psychology professor, wrote the book on Human Motivation. It's 688 pages long, but since the world might end in six months, I'll give you the short version. Everyone is driven by three things:


1. Achievement (the desire to compete against increasingly challenging goals)

2. Affiliation (the desire to be liked/loved)

3. Power
* Personalized (the desire for influence and respect for yourself)
* Socialized (the desire to empower others; to offer them influence and respect)


If people have the opportunity to achieve, affiliate and influence, they'll be motivated and engaged. Even without a clear vision of the future.

So instead of worrying about what life is going to be like tomorrow, focus on these three things today.

Sit in your office for an hour and think, one by one, about each of your people (including yourself). Ask:

* Is this person working on something meaningful and challenging; something for which he has about a 50% chance of succeeding?

* Is this person relating to other people in the office; people she likes and to whom she feel close?

* Is this person being recognized for the work he is doin"

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus - New York Times

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus - New York Times: "The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom."

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview: "It’s hard to spend a significant portion of your life studying diet and health and not want to interject yourself into someone’s life when you see them eating in a way you’ve come to consider unhealthy. Nonetheless, I treasure my friends and family and try to keep my thoughts buried far beneath the surface. If anyone asks for advice, I tell them, of course, to avoid the easily digestible carbohydrates, stay away from sugar in any form, and eat the foods we evolved to eat: meat, fish, fowl, eggs and the non-starchy vegetables."

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview: "It’s hard to spend a significant portion of your life studying diet and health and not want to interject yourself into someone’s life when you see them eating in a way you’ve come to consider unhealthy. Nonetheless, I treasure my friends and family and try to keep my thoughts buried far beneath the surface. If anyone asks for advice, I tell them, of course, to avoid the easily digestible carbohydrates, stay away from sugar in any form, and eat the foods we evolved to eat: meat, fish, fowl, eggs and the non-starchy vegetables."

Heart Disease - Lipoprotein Testing: Why it's So Important and Where You Can Get it Done

Heart Disease - Lipoprotein Testing: Why it's So Important and Where You Can Get it Done: "“My doctor said my cholesterol was fine . . . So why did I have a heart attack?!”

Let’s face it: Using cholesterol values alone to predict whether or not heart attack is in your future can lead to failure. Yes, it works statistically in a large population. But apply it to a specific individual, and you might as well roll the dice."

Heart Disease - Lipoprotein Testing: Why it's So Important and Where You Can Get it Done

Heart Disease - Lipoprotein Testing: Why it's So Important and Where You Can Get it Done: "“My doctor said my cholesterol was fine . . . So why did I have a heart attack?!”

Let’s face it: Using cholesterol values alone to predict whether or not heart attack is in your future can lead to failure. Yes, it works statistically in a large population. But apply it to a specific individual, and you might as well roll the dice."

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview: "Q: What do you, as a science journalist rather than a doctor, bring to the subject that will change our minds?

A: Perspective. I had no vested interest. I wasn’t taught in graduate or medical school that something was true and so never thought to question it. As a journalist, I question everything. And because my initial training was in physics and I had spent the last 20 years writing about controversial science, I know what’s required to do good science, the need to be skeptical of everything and, perhaps most importantly, to be skeptical of your own pet theories. Once I started my research, I just followed the evidence, not just a study here and there that supports a given point of view but all of the science. All the disciplines, not just a given one. I had no investment in any particular point of view, though I had my hunches based on preliminary research. Some of these hunches turned out to be right; some were wrong. One advantage I had working in the 21st century was that I could do an immense amount of research in a relatively short period of time."

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview: "A: Perspective. I had no vested interest. I wasn’t taught in graduate or medical school that something was true and so never thought to question it"

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes - Hardcover - Random House - Author Interview: "Q: When you’re not pouring over medical studies, what do you observe about the health and habits of people around you? If you could offer them a few pieces of advice, what would you say?

A: It’s hard to spend a significant portion of your life studying diet and health and not want to interject yourself into someone’s life when you see them eating in a way you’ve come to consider unhealthy. Nonetheless, I treasure my friends and family and try to keep my thoughts buried far beneath the surface. If anyone asks for advice, I tell them, of course, to avoid the easily digestible carbohydrates, stay away from sugar in any form, and eat the foods we evolved to eat: meat, fish, fowl, eggs and the non-starchy vegetables."

Inside Publishing: The End of Overeating

Inside Publishing: The End of Overeating: "We inspire and enable people to improve their lives and the world around them"

Inside Publishing: The End of Overeating

Inside Publishing: The End of Overeating: "how can we make the needed 'critical perceptual shift' that fundamentally changes the way we view food"

Twitter / Home

Twitter / Home: "Tip·Joyn. easy social payments for great people, causes, and content."

iGoogle

iGoogle: "An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.
- Joseph Addison"

Stress Tests: A Cardiologist Weighs In - Health Blog - WSJ

Stress Tests: A Cardiologist Weighs In - Health Blog - WSJ: "I get myself in trouble if I extend myself outside my area of expertise"

Mind - Stumbling Blocks on the Path of Righteousness - NYTimes.com

Mind - Stumbling Blocks on the Path of Righteousness - NYTimes.com: "But the point is that many types of behavior are driven far more by the situation than by the force of personality. What someone else did in that situation is a very strong warning about what you yourself would do"

Attention Must Be Paid — but How? - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com

Attention Must Be Paid — but How? - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com: "Ms. Gallagher’s “Rapt” is a survey of the science of attention and a guide to achieving what she calls the focused life. My column quotes some of her advice for shunning multi-tasking, Twittering, Crackberrying and other modern temptations. “Where did the idea come from that anyone who wants to contact you can do so at any time?” Ms. Gallagher said to me. “You need to take charge of what you pay attention to instead of responding to the latest stimuli. Taking top-down control of your own experience almost always correlates with well-being. You pull out your book on the subway, and suddenly it’s not so bad even though you’re surrounded by crazy people doing crazy things.”"

Attention Must Be Paid — but How? - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com

Attention Must Be Paid — but How? - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com: "Ms. Gallagher’s “Rapt” is a survey of the science of attention and a guide to achieving what she calls the focused life. My column quotes some of her advice for shunning multi-tasking, Twittering, Crackberrying and other modern temptations. “Where did the idea come from that anyone who wants to contact you can do so at any time?” Ms. Gallagher said to me. “You need to take charge of what you pay attention to instead of responding to the latest stimuli. Taking top-down control of your own experience almost always correlates with well-being. You pull out your book on the subway, and suddenly it’s not so bad even though you’re surrounded by crazy people doing crazy things.”"

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com: "When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice"

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com: "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n"

Op-Ed Columnist - A Complicated Question - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - A Complicated Question - NYTimes.com: "She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition. It was hard to walk away."

How to Decide in a Time of Confusion | BNET

How to Decide in a Time of Confusion | BNET: "Other Resources

Further Reading on Managing Uncertainty

* “Managing in a Downturn,” PricewaterhouseCoopers
* Harvard Business Review on Managing Uncertainty
* Ian MacMillan and Rita Gunther McGrath, “Using Discovery-Driven Planning in Business Building”
* “The Evolution of Crew Resource Management in Commercial Aviation,” University of Texas at Austin
* Decision Quality in Organizations course, Stanford University
* “Managing in the Fog,” The Economist
* “Managing in a Downturn,” Financial Times"

Gmail - CR #411: How You Make Choices, Part II - shekharkashyap@gmail.com

Gmail - CR #411: How You Make Choices, Part II - shekharkashyap@gmail.com: "'Too much information, running through my brain
Too much information, driving me insane.'

- The Police"

Bill Gates, Sr.: Why I Wrote Showing Up for Life

Bill Gates, Sr.: Why I Wrote Showing Up for Life: "I believe there's power in sharing stories. My dad, who dropped out of school in the 8th grade to help support his family, didn't live long enough to see how our story has unfolded. And, as I enter my mid-80s, I know that I likely won't see how life unfolds for my own grandchildren as they move beyond young adulthood. I can at least help them to understand mine.

Like my son, I am an optimist. I believe in the combined power of men and women who 'show up' for the people they love and the causes they believe in. I've seen the power of public will to take on and surmount great challenges and I believe our society works better when people think less about 'me and mine' and more about 'us and ours.'"

Need to Find a Job? Stop Looking So Hard - Peter Bregman - HarvardBusiness.org

Need to Find a Job? Stop Looking So Hard - Peter Bregman - HarvardBusiness.org: "Why does this work? Woody Allen once said that eighty percent of success is just showing up. When I first started my business, a great mentor of mine told me to join the boards of not-for-profits and do what I do best for them. Other board members will then see the results and want to hire my company to do the same for them and their companies. That's the obvious reason."

Gmail - FBL | Quote of the Day | May 4, 2009 - shekharkashyap@gmail.com

Gmail - FBL | Quote of the Day | May 4, 2009 - shekharkashyap@gmail.com: "We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live life fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating, and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime.”"

Gmail - FBL | Quote of the Day | May 4, 2009 - shekharkashyap@gmail.com

Gmail - FBL | Quote of the Day | May 4, 2009 - shekharkashyap@gmail.com: "“We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live life fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating, and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime.”"

Amazon.com: Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher: Books

Amazon.com: Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher: Books: "The author makes a strong argument about the superficial amount of focus children give due to technology overwhelm. Where hours of focused practice made for successful mastery of subjects, today's youth (and increasingly, many adults) are unable to focus long enough to complete tasks requiring intellectual rigor or deep thought. Or in the words of the author: 'when you're finally forced to confront intellectually demanding situations in high school or college, you may find that you've traded depth of knowledge for breadth and stunted your capacity for serious thought.'

In a time of information overwhelm, this is the one book that everyone should read, thoroughly."

Salon.com Books | Why can't we concentrate?

Salon.com Books | Why can't we concentrate?: "But while it's one thing to accommodate more information, it's another to engage with it fundamentally, in a way that allows us to perceive underlying patterns and to take concepts apart so that we can put them back together in new and constructive ways. The early human who was constantly fending off leopards or plucking low-hanging mangoes never got around to figuring out how to build a house. Because leopards and mangoes were for the most part relatively few and far between, most of our ancestors found it easier to summon the kind of attention conducive to completing projects that, in the long term, make life measurably better. Ironically, while immediate threats and fleeting treats are comparatively much rarer in our complex social world, the attention system designed to deal with them has been kept on perpetual alert by both design and happenstance.

As long as we remain only dimly aware of the dueling attention systems within us, the reactive will continue to win out over the reflective. We'll focus on discussion-board trolls, dancing refinancing ads, Hollywood gossip and tweets rather than on that enlightening but lengthy article about the economy or the novel or film that has the potential to ravish our souls. Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold! Over time, our brains will adapt themselves to these activitie"

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008): "Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008): "I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary

Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary: "Quotation of the Day ▼X?
Background:



Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Discuss"

Living Longer - Oprah.com

Living Longer - Oprah.com: "Dr. Gupta says Okinawa has the highest concentration of centenarians than any other place in the world for a number of reasons. For starters, they eat a plant-based diet, including lots of tofu and water-rich foods rather than calorie-dense ones.

The Okinawan cultural habit called hara hachi bu, which means you eat only until you are 80 percent full, also plays a big role in longevity, Dr. Gupta says. 'It means you never satiate yourself when you're eating, you never stuff yourself,' he says.

Perhaps the most important component of the Okinawans long life span is the way they approach aging. 'Elders as they get older are actually more respected, more revered, as they get up in years,' Dr. Gupta says. 'Aging is not treated as a disease and you are not discarded when you get to 65. In fact, there is no word for retirement in Japanese.'"

Living Longer - Oprah.com

Living Longer - Oprah.com: "The practice of ikigai, meaning 'sense of purpose,' is a huge part of their philosophy of life that contributes to living longer, Dr. Gupta says. 'As you get older, your sense of purpose becomes more strongly defined. You become a true elder in the community you integrate with younger people all the time.'"

Run Your Personal Finances Like A Business

Run Your Personal Finances Like A Business: "Successful Small Business Owners See the Big Picture
One of the hallmarks of successful small business owners is that they've figured out what works and what they do well. Then, armed with that knowledge, they throw 95% of their energy and resources in that direction. To break it down a little further, small business owners are masters at 'prioritizing, assessing and restraining.' If you can learn to implement these principles in your personal finances, you'll be on your way toward financial independence. (For further reading, see A Corporate Approach To Personal Finance.)"