Personal mastery

In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow.

Vocabulary gets in the way sometimes. Design is not just a profession. A customer is not only a person who buys something. A product is not just a physical object or software that you sell.

Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Decisive, outline four villains of decision-making that lead to poor decisions. The first villain is looking too narrowly at a problem. This is exactly why we want to explore multiple ways of framing the opportunity space. The second villain is looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs. This is commonly known

One former client, who is now the CEO of a health-care company, said if he had to identify one key element of his career success, it was realizing early on that every new role in his career carried its own particular purpose. Whether the new role came from a promotion or from a move to a different organization, his first task was always to get very

Just ‘going with the flow’ drains the purpose from your work and life, makes personal and professional relationships seem tenuous and uncertain, and almost guarantees that you’ll fail to live with intention. All this means you may not accomplish things you’d really like to accomplish.

Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.

True self-confidence is “the courage to be open—to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.” Real self-confidence is not reflected in a title, an expensive suit, a fancy car, or a series of acquisitions. It is reflected in your mindset: your readiness to grow.

If you find out that you were wrong, correct it immediately. Build a reputation as a rapid course corrector. You don't need to be right all the time to succeed if you can admit quickly when you're wrong. This will set you apart from the majority of people who get wedded to narratives too quickly and then refuse to revisit the analysis for fear of

Let Go to Accept. Letting go of old patterns and areas of resistance can sometimes happen in an “aha moment,” especially for everyday matters such as resistance to working on that expense report, to coming back from vacation, or to our email inboxes piling up. In cases like these, just being able to recognize that the expectation to have an empty