1: Priya Parker had been hired to facilitate a meeting on “one of the most politically divisive issues of our time,” she writes in her book The Art of Gathering. A dozen prominent civic leaders would attend.
The only problem? No one wanted to be there.
All of them “worked on the same hot-button issue, but from radically different angles,” she notes. “The leaders were, technically, on the same … continue reading
1: It was happening.
Sarah Dusek and her husband, Jacob, had started Under Canvas, a “glamping” business on ten acres of land six miles outside Yellowstone National Park. It was their first season, and excitement was in the mountain air. Â
“The camp was filled with eager glampers clamoring for a slice of Mother Nature, and Sarah was ecstatic that the business was up and running after immeasurable hard work,” … continue reading
1: The year was 1863. General Ulysses S. Grant was stuck.
For a year, he and his troops had tried to crack the defenses of Vicksburg. The city sat high on the cliffs of the Mississippi, providing a “stranglehold on the most important river in the country,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.
Ulysses had attacked Vicksburg head-on. … continue reading
1: The year was 1878. Thomas Edison was a man on a mission. Â
Day and night, he experimented with more than six thousand different filaments in his quest to discover the incandescent light bulb. Â
After spending a year in Thomas’ lab, Nikola Tesla commented: “If Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would ‘proceed at once’ to simply ‘examine straw after straw until he found the object … continue reading
1: Eleven days after the Union victory at Gettysburg and ten days after General Ulysses S. Grant’s crucial triumph at Vicksburg, Abraham Lincoln suffered what was likely his most gut-wrenching setback as commander-in-chief during the Civil War.
At Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee “had been forced to relinquish the battlefield for the first time, his Army of Northern Virginia reduced by almost twenty-three thousand men,” write Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin … continue reading
When faced with adversity, we can:
1. Get stuck (scientific term…) and circle around where we currently are
2. Make it Worse (we’ve all been there…)
3. View the setback as an opportunity for growth
This third path is one of life’s great success strategies. Instead of being paralyzed by obstacles, we are energized by the challenge and seize the opportunity to grow.
This week we are looking at some … continue reading
