There are so many choices today that it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the vast array of career possibilities.  Paradoxically the more choices people have, the more they paralyze themselves trying to find the right choice, and the less satisfied they are with their eventual decision. Too often people approach career decisions with a mindset [...]

How committed are you to having a career you absolutely love? Your level of commitment plays a key role in the process of creating a fulfilling career.  When people are undercommitted to their careers, they tend to get lousy results.  When they get clear about what they want and commit themselves to creating it, however [...]

There many strategies you can use to select and plan a career path, but perhaps the two most basic patterns are bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up career planning Bottom-up career planning means figuring out how you can best take advantage of the career building blocks you already possess.  It’s a low-level, objective method of planning. Perhaps the [...]

John Assaraf is an international best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. You may have seen him as one of the experts in the popular movie The Secret (as well as in The Secret book), talking about how he manifested his dream house. What’s most amazing is that he lived in that house for quite a while before discovering it was the exact same house he originally posted on his [...]

A scaffold is a temporary structure that supports tools, materials, and people while erecting or repairing a building.  A similar construct can be used to improve your personal productivity.  Much like wearing braces to reposition crooked teeth, a personal productivity scaffold is something you temporarily insert into your daily routine to help create and establish new habits.  Once those habits are conditioned, [...]

Sometimes we procrastinate on projects because we don’t know where to begin.  A goal like “write a book” might seem straightforward enough when first set, but when it’s time to act, the goal becomes this huge, amorphous blob.  Procrastination soon follows. A popular suggestion is to define the immediate next action that must be taken, and then focus on [...]

Journaling is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to accelerate your personal development.  By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them down in writing, you gain insights you’d otherwise never see. Beyond sequential thinking While your brain is technically capable of processing a great deal of input simultaneously, your conscious thoughts [...]

Sometimes we face tough decisions that involve one or more unknowns.  We can’t know in advance what the consequences of each alternative will be.  This is especially true of big decisions like quitting a job, entering or exiting a relationship, or moving to a new city. When faced with such a decision, what do you do?  If you [...]

Too often our important-but-not-urgent tasks get put on the back burner… and never make it to the front burner.  When you get busy with urgent tasks, you may feel pressured to finish those first before you can justify doing anything less urgent.  But then when you finally catch a break, you may decide you need [...]

In the previous article on How Your Mind Really Works, we explored the key strengths of human intelligence, such as our ability to identify invariant patterns and to recognize specific instances of them.  But these strengths don’t come without major drawbacks.  The human mind certainly has its share of weaknesses, gaps, and blind spots. It’s wise to cultivate [...]