Personal Development for Smart People^TM

I’ve added a new article called “Triple Your Personal Productivity” to the free articles section.
This is an updated version of a personal productivity article called “How to Get More Done in Less Time” which I wrote in 2000. It explains a simple method for calculating and optimizing your personal efficiency, allowing you to reclaim […]

Ron Lewison, a very experienced fellow Toastmaster, noted that a valuable career lesson he learned was to join groups or organizations where you just barely qualify for membership. They’ll pull you up to a whole new level.
This is outstanding advice.
On one hand it’s uncomfortable being in the bottom 10% of any group. But […]

Checking email too often is a significant productivity drain. Email by its very nature isn’t usually urgent unless it’s your entire job, such as answering customer support emails. Here are some tips to prevent email from taking too big a chunk out of your day.
1. Decide in advance exactly when you’ll check […]

As Albert Einstein once remarked, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.”
Here’s an interesting article about how the world of chess has changed after Deep Blue defeated World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.
But what’s interesting is not so much the parity; […]

Success literature going back hundreds of years espouses the benefits of hard work. But why is it that some people seem to feel that “hard work” is a dirty word nowadays?
I define “hard work” as work that is challenging. Both hard work and “working hard” (i.e. putting in the time required to get […]

Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
Read the rest from Hunter S. Thompson’s Security (via awasu).

Yesterday I competed in the 2005 Toastmasters International Speech Contest for my area (my area consists of 5 individual clubs). The contest was held at the Luxor Hotel here in Vegas. The pyramid-shaped Luxor has a giant Sphinx in front of it, and the contest was held in a room in the Sphinx’s […]

One problem-solving technique you should master is changing perspectives to redefine the problem.
The way you define a problem is often the key to solving it. Take a current problem from your life that you’re having difficulty solving. Then ask yourself: How can this problem be redefined as a financial problem? A […]

I wrote and posted another new article called “Marketing From Your Conscience.” In this article the concept of marketing is meant both professionally (marketing products and services) and personally (marketing yourself for a job or a relationship). The main point of the article is to show how marketing can be done much more […]