“After ignoring months of warning signs, I suddenly could not get out of bed,” Terry Looper writes in his book Sacred Pace: Four Steps to Hearing God and Aligning Yourself With His Will.

Terry was thirty-six years old.

“It felt like the oxygen had been turned off in my brain, making it impossible for me to even lift my head from the pillow,” he recalls. “This was more than … continue reading

1: Turns out anxiety and excitement are the exact same emotion.

Physiologically, that is. Which just means how your body operates.

“Whether you are anxious about something or excited about it, your body responds in a nearly identical ‘high arousal’ state,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.

How does your body react?

“You have excess energy, you may feel butterflies in your stomach, … continue reading

1: How do you personally respond when adversity strikes?

Do you see adversity as a challenge you can meet, or as a threat that could overwhelm you?

Your perspective on adversity significantly impacts your life.

Good news: There’s a proven way to shift from threat to challenge. Read on to learn how.

“In a threat mindset, you focus on the potential for risk, danger, harm, or loss,” Jane McGonigal writes … continue reading

1: Ready for an interesting fact about games?

When we play them, we almost never feel hopeless.

“It’s true,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.

“Psychologists have studied the top emotions during game play, and genuine anxiety and pessimism are extremely rare,” Jane notes. “Even when we’re losing or struggling, we’re vastly more likely to feel determined and optimistic than panicked or powerless.”… continue reading

How does creating a game help someone recover from a brain injury?

1: “How could a game so seemingly trivial, so admittedly simple, intervene so powerfully in such serious, in some cases life-and-death, circumstances?” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.

Following her 2009 concussion, Jane was at her lowest point, plagued by suicidal thoughts.

Then, suddenly, she had a thought: What if … continue reading

1: In the summer of 2009, researcher and game designer Jane McGonigal hit her head and got a concussion.

“It didn’t heal properly,” Jane writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully, “and after thirty days I still had constant headaches, nausea, and vertigo.”

Reading or writing was only possible for a few minutes at a time. “I had trouble remembering things,” Jane notes. “Most days I … continue reading

1: “We managers like to talk about change, so much that embracing change has become a cliché of management,” Andy Grove writes in Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

But not all changes are the same.

What Andy calls “a strategic inflection point is not just any change,” he notes. “It compares to change the way Class VI rapids on a … continue reading

1: Then Intel CEO Andy Grove was sitting in a conference room with other members of the Intel team.

The topic? “Evaluations of a certain highly touted new software from a company whose other products we already use,” Andy writes in his legendary business book, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

Intel’s head of Information Technology shared the challenges her team … continue reading

1: Intel president Andy Grove was nervous.

It was 1986. Andy had flown to Oregon to address Intel’s best developers, recognizing that the company stood at a crossroads, he writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.

Since the company’s inception, memory chips had been the company’s core business.

But now the company was exiting the memory chip business because Japanese competitors had entered the market with higher quality … continue reading

1: When former Intel CEO Andy Grove was in school, the instructor in his management class showed a scene from the World War II movie Twelve o’Clock High.

A new leader was brought in to reform a rogue squadron whose lack of discipline led to self-destruction.

“On his way to take charge,” Andy writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive, “the new commander stops his car, steps … continue reading