I have had a lot of teachers throughout my life. Some taught me because they were paid to, some because they were supposed to, and some because they wanted to. Many of the best teachers in my life, though, had no idea that they were teaching me. (Or, perhaps more accurately, that I was learning [...]
On the TV show NCIS the main character, Special Agent Gibbs, has two primary passions: catching bad guys and building boats. Not just any kind of boat, but hand made wooden sailboats. Which he builds in his basement. (A running gag on the show is the question of how he gets the boats out of [...]
Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose Three things that Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers) and Dan Pink (Drive) have written about in terms of meaningful work and a meaningful life aimed primarily at adults that are also important parts of growing up. As infants and toddlers, the focus for kids is to learn, to master things like [...]
In his book Mastery, George Leonard talks about the “war on mastery”. This could just as easily be called a “war on hard”. Watch TV for just a couple of minutes and you will be bombarded with ads or talk shows or news stories that show you how do something in just a couple (if [...]
When talking about management, what most people are thinking about is efficiency, maximizing output per unit of input. Many (most?) people talk about the need for leadership in addition to, or even instead of, management. But what exactly do we get from leadership? What is its purpose? The first word that comes to mind is [...]
How often do you hear people say, “I sure hope today is an easy day”? Probably quite often. How often do you hear people say, “I sure hope today is a hard day”? Probably not quite as often. Someone who knows the value of the hard days is Cesar Millan, aka the Dog Whisperer. On a [...]
Complete and total awkwardness. An amazing lack of coordination between feet and hands. Bare feet rubbed raw and blistered. One blister bursting and leaving a trail of blood following me across the floor (which I, of course, cleaned up). A couple of lapses in concentration, resulting in a couple of hits to the head – [...]
I had been meaning to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Successever since it was first published just over a year ago. Since a lot of the discussion of the book focused on the “10,000 hour rule” for achieving expertise, or mastery, it seemed a perfect fit for my interests. I’m still surprised that [...]
When I first discovered the Cynefin framework, I remember thinking, “Exactly.” It is one of those things that once I saw it I realized how obvious it was, at least in hindsight after someone had pointed it out. Of course, I’ve been trying to actually figure it out ever since. Dave Snowden blogged recently that [...]
Of all of the daily meditations in 365 Tao, yesterday’s meditation on Engagement is the one that most deeply resonates for me: Prey passes the tiger who Sometimes merely looks, Sometimes pounces without hesitation, But never fails to act. Don’t just let life pass you by. Engage with it, be aware of all of the [...]
