Good, Better, Best

I was having an email conversation with my accountability partners about some decisions I was making for the future. Among them is the choice to forego the PASS Summit this year, the premier conference for my career path. This was before I became ill last week and was unable to travel and speak at another [...]

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Be Intentional about Your Improvement

Want to get better? Be intentional about it. Plan out your development. Think about what you need to do to improve and build a schedule or routine. This isn’t just for weight lifting, but for most anything in life. A month ago I was playing some hymns on my flute and realized that I hadn’t [...]

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Accepting What Is

“The database is gone.” I was in Charlotte, NC, helping out another site with a brand new upgrade of our primary application. Columbia, SC, where I was based, would upgrade the following day. We had received promises over and over again that this particular release had been fully tested. This tells you all you need [...]

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Lead Where You Are

My oldest daughter just passed her latest belt test at American karate. This picture is of her, her instructor, and her two black belt brothers. The bigger one is my oldest son, whom I wrote about earlier. There are 4 levels of students at this studio: Beginning students – white suits Intermediate students – black [...]

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Better Define Your Goals

Ambiguous goals are useless. An example of an ambiguous goal is “I want to lose weight.” What does that mean? The problem with a goal like this is if I step on the scale first thing in the morning after skipping a couple of glasses of water the night before (meaning I’m slightly dehydrated), I’ve [...]

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Teach What You Know

The boy in red is my oldest. He and his younger brother achieved one of their major life goals last year when they passed their black belt test in American karate. It was a long journey. We often talk about one and five year goals. They stuck to it past five years because there teacher [...]

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Find a Way to Do a Little Towards Your Goal

Last night I was feeling terrible. I had stayed home due to sinuses but I had on my workout schedule to go run. I really wasn’t feeling up to it, but I knew that if I didn’t go, I would be setting myself back. I needed to do something, at least a little, so when [...]

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Be Prolific to Be Excellent

I want to produce great work. However, I understand that in order to produce great work, you usually have to produce a lot of work. Not everyone can be a Harper Lee. We’re often not good judges of whether we’ve done great work. For instance, most bloggers will point out that there are blog posts [...]

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What Becoming an MVP Meant to Me

I remember in the mid 2000s when I wanted to do enough to be recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Microsoft SQL Server. At that time I saw it as the “next level.” Folks I really respected were being named MVPs, folks I wanted to follow in the footsteps of, so naturally, [...]

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Don’t Be Pressured Into Saying Yes

The picture is of retired NBA player, Dikembe Mutombo. Whenever he blocked a shot, he was famous for doing the “No, no, no” finger wag, telling the opposing player not to try that again. On Thursday morning a project manager came and sat in my cube and I had to be Dikembe. The topic was [...]

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