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

1: “There’s wind and then there’s a typhoon, there are waves and then there’s a tsunami,” Andy Grove writes in Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

The same is true in business.

“There are competitive forces and then there are supercompetitive forces,” he notes.

Andy calls it a “10X” change.

2: Harvard Professor Michael Porter identified the various forces that determine … 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: Bo had Parkinson’s disease. He was sixty-one years old.

“He lived alone for two decades until he needed extra care, and moved back to the town where his kids and ex-wife still lived,” Diane Button writes in her wonderful book What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living.

Bo went to live with Joon, his youngest daughter, whose husband was in the army and was deployed … 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: “Imagine we’re floating in a clear blue ocean—somewhere warm like Hawaii or Mexico,” Ron Shaich writes in his terrific book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.  

“Waves are breaking and rolling toward the white, sandy beach,” Ron notes.  “We know that’s where we are headed, so our ultimate destination is clear.  And we know that any wave will take you to shore.

“But not just … continue reading

This week and next we are exploring Sahil Bloom’s concept of “Social Wealth” as outlined in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

Today we turn to a list of “Social Wealth Hacks I Wish I Knew at Twenty-Two” which Sahil put together with Arthur C. Brooks, social scientist, Harvard Business School professor, and number one New York Times bestselling … continue reading

1: “Greg Sloan was on the fast track,” Sahil Bloom writes in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.
“Just into his early thirties,” he notes, “he had risen to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs, one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world, and he served as a trusted financial adviser to a long list of well-known corporate … 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