“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: I’m often credited with the motto, “Only the paranoid survive,” former Intel Chairman and CEO Andy Grove writes in his legendary business book of the same name.
“I have no idea when I first said this,” Andy notes, “but the fact remains that, when it comes to business, I believe in the value of paranoia.”
Why?
Because “business success contains the seeds of its own destruction,” he observes. “The … continue reading
1: “Should Yahoo bring back Koogle?”
Felicia Horowitz smiled at her husband, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz.
“Huh?”
It was 2012, and Yahoo had just fired its CEO, Scott Thompson.
“Tim Koogle? How do you even know who Tim Koogle is?” he writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Felicia then recalled a conversation they had shared eleven years earlier, back in 2001.… continue reading
1: Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to his business partner and then Loudcloud CEO Ben Horowitz:
Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?”
Ben: “What?”
Marc: “You only experience two emotions: Euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances both.”
The year was 2000. The dot-com implosion was happening.
Ben and Marc had raised almost $200 million to launch Loudcloud, a startup focused on network … continue reading
1: It was the early 1970s, and cognitive psychologist Virginia Valian was stuck.
She “found herself so paralyzed by work anxiety that she couldn’t write a word of her PhD thesis,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Our lives can be shaped by what it is we are trying to avoid, Oliver observes. “We talk about … 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: Author Gay Hendricks received a text from a member of his extended family.
A family member was asking “for a loan of several thousand dollars for extra holiday expenses and to pay a tax lien,” Gay writes in his book The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity.
“Based on her dismal record of repaying past loans (zero for five over … continue reading
1: Author Oliver Burkeman was anxious.
He was waiting for the subway at the Union Street station in Brooklyn “fretting in my customary manner, this time about the logistics of a forthcoming move between apartments, although it could have been anything,” he writes in his terrific book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
What was he worried about? He was … continue reading
1: “Germans are extremely proud of their engineers—particularly those in the car industry, which is home to stellar high-export brands like Daimler, BMW, and Porsche,” Fred Kofman writes in The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
Martin Winterkorn, the future and now former CEO of Volkswagen, is an “intelligent, ambitious overachiever,” Fred notes, earning a PhD in physics from Germany’s acclaimed Max Planck Institute.
Martin got … continue reading
