1: It was a broiling hot day.

Future entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz was early in his career.  He was married with three young children.

One day, his father came to visit.

“We could not afford air-conditioning, and all three children were crying as my father and I sat there sweating in the 105-degree heat,” Ben writes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There … continue reading

1: In 2006, renowned New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer offered twenty-seven-year-old Will Guidara a career-changing opportunity.  

Will was to become the General Manager of Eleven Madison Park (also known as EMP), a New York City fine-dining restaurant.

Will and Chef Daniel Humm were charged with reinventing the restaurant.

Eleven years later, the pair achieved the highest honor in dining when Eleven Madison Park. was named No. 1 in The … continue reading

1: Psychologist John Gottman can predict who will eventually get divorced a stunning 94 percent of the time.

In a pioneering 1992 study, John and his team interviewed fifty-two married couples.

They asked each couple “a variety of questions about how they met, why they decided to get married, and what changes their relationships had been through and observed them as they took part in a fifteen-minute discussion about a … continue reading

1: “Screw them. We could run a better convenience store than these folks!”

Twenty-one-year-old college student Ron Shaich was mad.  He and his friends had been “escorted” out of the Store 24 convenience store directly across from Clark University, which they attended.

The “beefy security guard . . . had taken one look at the trio of scruffy kids lingering over the ice-cream freezer and decided we were intent on … continue reading

1: Gay Hendricks had just delivered his first speech to a professional audience.

A man approached the podium and said, “I really enjoyed your talk.  It wasn’t so much what you said but the way you said it,” Gay writes in his book The Genius Zone.

Gay had always been nervous about public speaking, so the compliment lit him up.  “What did you like about the way I spoke?” … continue reading

1: “The world is watching,”  Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals.

The late Matthew Perry is playing a producer in the television drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He’s been hired to “rescue and relaunch a national weekly comedy show, based transparently on Saturday Night Live,” Oliver notes.

The stakes are high.

“Throughout the episode, anxiety builds visibly while a huge digital clock on the … continue reading

1: “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience,” said the educational reformer John Dewey.

Our ability to think, to reflect, to “think about our thinking” is integral to our ability to learn.

The term used to describe our ability to be aware of our thinking is called metacognition. 

Which author Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls “the forgotten secret to success” in her book Tiny Experiments… continue reading

1: We like systems.

“Few things are more appealing, when we’re hoping to change our lives, than a new system for doing so,”  Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

Perhaps our goal is to experience the peace and clarity that we believe meditation can bring.

We resolve to become meditators.

We begin by purchasing a book … continue reading

1: The year was 2007. Nokia controlled an astonishing 49% share of the mobile phone market.

Wowza.

What else happened that year? The iPhone was introduced.

Nokia’s “inability to adapt to swift technological changes ultimately led to their downfall, serving as a cautionary tale for leaders in the AI era,” Geoff Woods writes in The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions.

Nokia was unable to adapt … continue reading

1: “If you’ve ever seen a picture of your mother or father as a young adult, you know how startling it can be,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.  

“They seem like people we might have met along the road rather than the parents who created us,” the authors observe.  “They often appear less burdened, more … continue reading