The way I “lifehack”

Steve Jones (blog | twitter) posted an interesting thought about lifehacking based on a post he read. Steve’s point is that he makes efficiency changes that benefit him. He doesn’t kill himself trying to be as efficient as possible, especially if it takes away from other things in life. It seems the original poster got [...]

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Toastmasters Table Topics Questions – Summer Vacation Theme

Here were the Table Topics questions I used for our meeting today. If you’re not familiar with Toastmasters, it’s a great professional development organization and most clubs’ meetings are a lot of fun. Ours are. Table topics allow for impromptu speaking opportunities so member are better able to respond and interact to questions they haven’t [...]

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Old Isn’t Always Bad

I remember back in the late 1990s I was having a conversation with one of my cousins about a particular combination in shotokan karate that he was studying. He was explaining how, when it was westernized, there was a certain movement that was simplified because it was difficult to teach. It often required students to [...]

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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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Seek to “Renew” Old Skills

Back a few years ago a couple of friends of mine wanted to get into the betas of the MMORPGs that were starting to debut. One of them got the idea to stand up a site where we talked about gaming and did gaming reviews. If we were seen legitimately as a gaming review site, then [...]

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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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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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