“Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them if they weren’t already yours. But watch yourself, that you don’t value these things to the point of being troubled should you lose them.” -Marcus Aurelius
1: Dr. Daniel Friedland knew he had made a mistake. A big mistake. He awoke “with the painfully familiar sense of depression,” Danny recalls in Leading Well from Within: A Neuroscience and Mindfulness-Based Framework for Conscious Leadership. “I believed I’d made a terrible decision.” Danny was a leading expert on evidence-based medicine (EBM), which had become the “gold standard by which all healthcare decisions are made,” he writes. He was the author of one of…
Getting better at getting better is what Rise With Drew is all about. Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations. On Friday, I share something about myself or what we at PCI are doing in our quest to earn a spot on Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Two years ago, I participated in philosopher Brian Johnson’s Heroic Coach Program. The culmination of the program is a…
Genius Network founder Joe Polish met the world famous entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson for the first time at a dinner to raise money for Richard’s foundation, Virgin Unite. Joe had donated $15,000 to Richard’s charity. “In exchange, Joe was invited to have dinner with Richard and a small group of other donors,” write Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy in Who Not How. During the dinner, the other donors were focused on extracting as much value as they…
Like most entrepreneurs, Carl Castledine worked crazy hours. “By sheer grit and willpower, he was able to build up a decent clientele,” write Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy in Who Not How. Still, Carl knew his company, Away Resorts, could do better. Specifically, he needed to improve the company’s website and online presence. So, Carl went to work. “On top of the ridiculous hours he was already working, he began staying up all night learning to code for…
Dr. Benjamin Hardy was about to launch his first book, Willpower Doesn’t Work. “I did everything by myself. I scheduled all my media and podcasts. I worked directly with the publisher,” he recalls in Who Not How. “And after lining everything up, which involved a lot of decision-making and mental labor, not to mention time, I then had to muster the energy to show up to the interviews to market the book.” Looking back, Ben just shakes his…
There are technical problems and adaptive problems, author and entrepreneur Dean Jackson believes. “Technical problems are when the answer is already known,” he shares with Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy in Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork. Let’s say we want to set up a WordPress website. That is an example of a technical problem. For these types of challenges, we want to ask ourselves: Who? As in “Who can do this…
“Make the mental image. Make it clear, distinct, perfect; hold it firmly; the ways and means will develop; supply will follow the demand; you will be led to do the right thing at the right time and in the right way. Earnest Desire will bring about Confident Expectation, and this in turn must be reinforced by Firm Demand.” – Charles Haanel
1: There is a big difference between perfectionism and optimizing. Perfection is a distant star we can never reach. After all, there are no perfect human beings. We are, in fact, perfectly imperfect. Two years ago, I had the opportunity to take Philosopher Brian Johnson’s year-long Heroic Coach program, which focuses on Optimizing. The person who is mistake-free is sitting around doing nothing, Brian tells us. As professional optimizers, we accept our imperfections. We have high…
“A deer’s brain tells it to run because things are bad,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle is the Way. “It runs. Sometimes, right into traffic.” 1: There is a better way. We can learn to slow things down. Steady our nerves. “We can question that impulse. We can disagree with it. We can override the switch, examine the threat before we act.” The phrase “This happened, and it is bad” is actually two statements,…
1: The German Blitzkrieg (translation: lightning war) was one of the most menacing and terrifying developments in modern warfare. Having lost World War I in a series of drawn-out trench warfare, the Germans created a new fighting strategy for World War II: They would fight with concentrated mobile divisions. “Like the tip of a spear, columns of panzer tanks rushed into Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France with devastating results and little opposition,” writes Ryan…
1: “This issue. This obstacle—this frustrating, unfortunate, problematic, unexpected problem preventing [us] from doing what [we] want to do,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle is the Way. “What if embedded inside it or inherent in it were certain benefits—benefits only for [us]?” What would we do? What would most people do? “Let’s be honest: Most of us are paralyzed,” Ryan writes. “Whatever our individual goals, most of us sit frozen before the many obstacles…
“Wherever God has put you, that is your vocation. It is not what we do but how much love we put into it.” –Mother Teresa
1: The year was 170 A.D. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of the Roman Empire, sat down to write. Perhaps it was “at night in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. “Or perhaps it was before dawn at the palace in Rome. Or he stole a few seconds to himself during the games, ignoring the…
What exactly is “blissipline”? Getting better at getting better is what Rise With Drew is all about. Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations. On Friday, I share something about myself or what we at PCI are doing in our quest to earn a spot on Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Two years ago, I had the fantastic opportunity to participate in philosopher Brian Johnson’s Heroic…
Nora Abousteit loves to throw a party. 1: “She hosts and attends more gatherings than most people I know, and she hosts more generously and seriously as well,” writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Nora is an entrepreneur who lives in New York City. “Born in a small town in Germany to a German mother and an Egyptian father, she has spent her career building communities of…
The big event is finally here. We have our guests’ attention. “They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there. They might well be considering giving the gathering their all,” writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. 1: One way to make an event memorable and worthwhile involves connecting our guests with one another. “One measure of a successful gathering is that it starts off with a higher number of…
For many years, when medical teams gathered to operate on a patient, they often didn’t know one another’s names before starting. 1: It turns out this practice had unintended and deadly consequences. “A 2001 Johns Hopkins study found that when members introduced themselves and shared concerns ahead of time, the likelihood of complications and deaths fell by 35 percent,” writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. “Surgeons, like…
“You cannot remove struggle from life, but you can improve your ability to handle challenge.” -James Clear
1: It’s the first day of class at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. About one hundred graduate students find their seats. Professor Ronald Heifetz, a popular professor and well-known authority on leadership, sits in a black swivel chair in the front of the classroom. He doesn’t take attendance or begin his lecture. He just sits there, staring at the ground “with a blank, slight bored look on his face,” writes Priya Parker, a former student in the…