If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Percy Shelley
Image source: Flickr.com – Alicia Rissler – (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Author: admin (Page 26 of 82)
Successful leaders continue to grow and learn on the job. In fact, an essential leadership attribute is the ability to remain open to new ways of thinking and to continuously learn new skills.
According to the research Learning About Learning Agility by the Center for Creative Leadership and Teachers College, Columbia University, the willingness and ability to learn throughout one’s career is increasingly important as changing technology, markets and methods require new skills and behaviors.
Over the long term, your ability to learn new knowledge, skills and behaviors will equip you to respond to future challenges more than your current skill-set.
Researchers found five tips that enable one’s learning agility:
- Innovate: Challenge the status quo
- Perform: Remain calm in the midst of adversity
- Reflect: Take time for reflection
- Risk: Purposely seek challenging situations
- Defend: Be open and avoid defensive thinking
Read more here
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Which are the nine most important things that it is possible to learn in our life? In an interesting article mixing numerology, wittiness and common sense, Maria Popova, the founder of “Brain pickings”, tried to create her own personal list.
Here’s the result:
- Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. In a world where everyone has an opinion, sometimes being incoherent and changing our minds could connect us with our hidden self.
- Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. The best incentive is to do what makes you happy.
- Be generous with your time and your resources and especially, with your words.
- Build pockets of stillness into your life. Finding the time for a walk or for yoga allows you to stay centered, to generate ideas and to entice your creative thinking.
- When people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. The assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
- Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity for. Look for what makes life worth living.
- Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time. At odds with the culture of immediacy, let’s enjoy the period of blossoming “where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny”.
- Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them and visit them often.
- Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
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Mañana es el dia mas ocupado de la semana (Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week)
Spanish Proverb
Image source: Flickr – Max Wheeler (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
On August 9th, 1940, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of UK, sent a Memorandum to the War Cabinet . He asked his staff to write shorter Reports and to avoid those useless phrases which could be replaced by one word.
In particular he wrote, in the final part of the Memorandum:
The saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real point concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.
Copy of the original document is available at UK National Archives http://www.ukwarcabinet.org.uk/documents/345
In his short talk at TED@NYC, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Hogan Vice President of Research and Innovation, examines the relationship between confidence and competence. Most people, according to his researches, are overconfident. He urges the audience to take a more self-aware approach to confidence, and to embrace the power of negative thinking.
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Peter Drucker
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Sherrie Campbell in a post for the blog “Entrepreneur“ investigates a particular area of life which, if fully developed, may lead to everlasting happiness and success.
Sherrie’s thoughts could be considered as a recipe! You can imagine emotional wealth as a well-prepared dish to impress your loved one and each ingredient needs to be carefully picked!
Here are the ingredients:
1.Confidence is like the salt we put in boling water to cook pasta
2.Resilience is like the cooking pot
3.Keep looking forward is refraining from testing during the preparation
4.Don’t compromise yourself: if you don’t like molecular cuisine, don’t do it!
5.Faith: believe in yourself and your abilities: the object of your desire will be satisfied!
6.Maturity: be patient, and choose no shortcuts (no frozen pizza, pre-packed sushi or home-delivered chinese, please!)
7.Discerning: proportion and quality of ingredients are always better than quantity, just as friends
8.Reality: you cook what you really want: no trendy recipes!
9.Readiness: put your cooking tools on the working board,
10.Self-preservation: you know when to stop cooking and have a sip of wine
11.Value time: or your soufflè will deflate…..
12.Have limits: no red wine with lobster, please!
13.Altruism: you cook for your loved one, not for your own glory
14.True to yourself: see n. 8!
15 Create happiness: it’s not a given, it’s an happiness-generator
For the full article read here
Image source: Flickr – Anders Sandberg – (CC BY 2.0)
Everyone strives for a reasonable work/life balance, but it’s a common experience that it is often very hard to reach. Professional help may come in handy.
In a recent Time magazine article Tim Ferriss, author of the international bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, has shared six tips to enhance productivity, illustrated the science behind them, why they really work and have a positive impact on your daily routine.
- Manage Your Mood. Most productivity systems underestimate the impact of feelings. If you are calm and happy you are more likely to get your work done sooner and better.
- Don’t Check Email in The Morning. Checking your inbox first things first in the morning amounts to having your priorities hijacked by whoever has decided to send you a message.
- Before You Try To Do It Faster, Ask Whether It Should Be Done At All. Not all the things you are planning to do really need to be done before you call it a day. Focus only on what is really important and set your priorities accordingly.
- Focus Is Nothing More Than Eliminating Distractions.
Concentration is key to successful prioritization. - Have A Personal System. Productive people have a routine, a system of their own to get things done, and they stick to it.
- Define Your Goals The Night Before.
If you wake up and you have already thought about what should be your priority during the day you are halfway to success.
Do you want to know more?
Image source: Flickr – Matt Gibson (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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