1: “Inside the cockpit, alarms were blaring,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better.

Qantas Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny looked at the display.

Twenty-one of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled.

“Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four,” Charles describes.

“The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems … continue reading

1: As the pilots stepped into the cockpit, 440 passengers were preparing to board the eight-hour flight from Singapore to Sydney.

“Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better..

Richard is a blunt Australian, “a cross between Crocodile Dundee and General Patton,” … continue reading

1: “Shelley was speechless,” says Mike Oppedahl, the managing partner at GiANT Worldwide.

He had just introduced the 5 Gears tool, which we’ve been exploring this week in RiseWithDrew.

“Shelley is a rock star,” he says in Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram’s book The 5 Gears: How to Be Present and Productive When There is Never Enough Time.

She’s “like a cruise missile as it pertains to … continue reading

1: “Monday, July 1st, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break,” David McCullough writes in his book John Adams.

John Adams, then one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress, was up before sunrise.

Early that morning, he wrote a long letter to Archibald Bulloch, the new president of Georgia: “This morning is assigned … continue reading

1: When Eric Quintanilla told his wife and his mother he was considering joining the Marines, neither thought it was a good idea.

The night before, he talked to a former high school classmate at a party. That friend had just finished basic training and was twenty pounds lighter and ripped, Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

“He was telling jokes and … continue reading

1: “It’s harder to confess in areas where I am proficient,” Terry Looper writes in his book Sacred Pace: Four Steps to Hearing God and Aligning Yourself With His Will.

“If I’m already pretty good at something, I get in this mindset that I don’t need the Lord,” Terry observes. “I may not even think about Him when troubles arise, simply because I’m a pro at this; I can … continue reading

1: It was November of 1988, and Terry Looper was on his way to Las Vegas.

Terry owned 10 percent of the company that was about to be sold.

“Once the papers were signed, I should’ve been on top of the world,” he writes in his book Sacred Pace: Four Steps to Hearing God and Aligning Yourself With His Will.

“I was not just a millionaire as I’d always … continue reading

1: Did you know that Babe Ruth began his baseball career in 1914 using a 54-ounce bat?

“That’s a big bat,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their powerful book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.

“For those of you who are not familiar with what’s ‘normal’ for baseball bats,” the authors note, “most professional baseball players today use a bat that weighs between 31 and 35 ounces.”… continue reading

1: “We had lost our bearings. We were wandering in the valley of death,” Andy Grove writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

The year was 1984, a pivotal moment for Intel.

The company had been founded 16 years earlier.  “Every start-up has some kind of a core idea,” Andy notes.

“Ours was simple. Semiconductor technology had … continue reading

1: “What are we not doing?”

That was the question Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz added to the agenda of his weekly staff meeting.

After several near-death experiences during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, the company began to show signs of life.

“Now that we’d improved our competitive position, we went on the offensive,” Ben writes in his wonderful book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business … continue reading