When you are younger, it’s possible to be successful because you are smarter, more talented, or more of a hustler than your peers. However, as you grow older, you begin to see patterns that you might have overlooked before simply because you didn’t have as much data. Knowledge can be bought, but wisdom is always earned.
If you want the important work to get done, and done well, then you need to schedule time for it. Don’t let your frantic schedule disrupt your rhythm. Dedicate time to what matters most and do work you’ll be proud of in ten years.
With the increase of information crossing your attention span each day, it's easy to forget even the most impactful experiences. Make every effort to capture these, and to ensure that they become a valuable part of your creative process.
Your "on demand" job cannot contain the totality of your creative ideas and energy. We all must embrace "unnecessary creating" in order to maintain a portfolio of activity that helps us grow in skills, drive, and the ability to take advantage of opportunities.
Tom Rath is the author of several books, including Strengths Finder 2.0, and Eat Move Sleep. His new book is called Are You Fully Charged?, and addresses the small actions that make a big difference in everyday effectiveness in life and work.
Many people allow their life to become cluttered with passive yes's, not active ones. They are living with a decision they made months or years ago, and are not making the effort to re-visit whether it's still the right decision. Sometimes you have to say "no" in order to re-focus your efforts.
In this interview, Jon discusses how to make strategic investments now in your life and career that will pay dividends for a long time to come.
Your best work results from a deep understanding of who you're creating for. You have to define your intended audience.
Don’t rob yourself, and stop trying to will yourself to do better. Instead, recognize that small actions of focus and discipline today is the best way to love your future self. Make investments today so that you can reap a return tomorrow.
Small things done well lead to big results. Small things done poorly eventually lead to failure. As a creative professional, you have three responsibilities to fulfill. In this episode, we address each of them and a few small practices to help you succeed in 2015.
Life is noisy, and it's only getting more so, which makes it difficult to stay focused and get in touch with your creative intuition. Is it possible in these hyper-connected times to actually get alone with your thoughts?
It’s often not the circumstances we learn from, but our response to them. Identifying limiting narratives or patterns of self-destruction can help us spot them when they crop up, then nip them before they cause us to implode or obsess needlessly over critique.
Many of us lack the kind of latitude over our schedule that we’d like to have, but all of us have some discretion about how we spend our time. The best way to prevent distractions and make steady progress on your most important work is to dedicate predictable time to it.
Did you know that Jimi Hendrix once toured as the opening act for The Monkees? Let's just say that the experiment didn't go so well. Here are some reflections on making art for the wrong crowd.
Run YOUR race. Execute YOUR plan. Do YOUR work, not someone else's. Don't allow envy, spite, ego, or greed to derail you or cause you to chase a phantom ideal that was never meant for you.
It's important to adapt your rhythms to the season you are in rather than expecting circumstances to conform to your systems. To perform at your best, you must structure your weekly activity by design, not default.
Anything of value that you wish to create will require a significant investment of time. Brilliant work is expensive.
If you want to have great ideas consistently, you must be curious about the world around you. Are there ways you can stoke and enhance your curiosity? You bet! Today we address a few of them.
There are three common places where you might get stuck when doing challenging creative work. Here's how to identify each, and some tools for re-gaining traction.
You have 168 hours each week. Some of those hours you will probably spend doing things you have to do, some of them doing things you choose to do, and some of them doing things simply on autopilot.