One of the many traits I admired about my dad was his relentless desire to understand why things were the way that they were. 

As a software engineer, he would rather pour over documentation to solve his coding problems than copy and paste StackOverflow code that he didn’t fully...

“We can be very proud of our achievements last week in Malaysia, but there is no room for complacency”.

Those were the words that Toto Wolff, Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport, told his team after winning their second race in a row in the 2014 Formula 1 Championship Season. 

It’s...

You are not synonymous with your mistakes. 

You are not the typo on your cover letter. 

You are not the innocuous rounding error on your finance report. 

You are not the delay in your project plan. 

You’re human, which means you’re going to occasionally make mistakes. ...

Every so often, you’re going to have one of those days. 

One of those days where you struggle to focus,

where your energy feels lower than usual,

where you can’t seem to muster up the right words no matter how hard you try, 

where the one thing that...

Early in my career, I had a glorified sense of productivity. 

I was surrounded by buzz words and phrases like hustle, get shi* done, and Just Do It. 

Gary V. was the man (any Crushing It! fans out there?).

Suffice it to say though, I had the misguided...

Many critical actions are preceded by debate — they start with utterances of “I think” or one of its many variations including “maybe”, “I wonder if”, and “I guess”.

At some point though, when action needs to be taken, the tone shifts with the use of powerful declarative statements like...

In order for a team or organization to effectively move towards a specific goal, there must first be a shared understanding of the answers to the following questions:

Who or what does the work serve? (Mission) Why do we approach our work in the way that we do? (Operating Philosophy...

Not all things are equally worthy of your time. 

For example, most would agree that spending 10 minutes fuming about a mistake a driver made on the road is not as useful or meaningful as spending 10 minutes catching up with a friend or working on a project you really care...

Sometimes actions are part of a distinct chain reaction: 
A charity coordinator launches a campaign to solicit donations, your friend finds this campaign compelling and, in addition to donating, goes out of her way to tell you about it. You donate and share the campaign as well. Suffice it to...

I’ve written about kindness several times on my blog (here, here, and here) for a couple of reasons:  There are so many compelling reasons to resolve to be kind in all aspects of life and work.  Kindness is not a box that we check, but rather something we choose to...