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I got some really strange looks on the Zoom call. Well, what I said made sense to me. Apparently not to many others. We were talking about the balance between the internal acceptance of what God has planned for one’s life vs. the internal drive to achieve more. I responded that my goal was to…
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👉“Great job on that report.” 👉“You knocked that presentation out of the park.” 👉“Thanks for bringing that system back online.” Praise is easy to give. It’s easy to hear. It makes the giver and the receiver feel good. 🎉“Your thorough research on the infrastructure cost and benefits in that report gave our CFO the clarity…
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It’s a lie. It’s a trap. You resist taking an action because of how you think someone else is going to respond. ❌ If I text them, they’re going to feel interrupted.❌ If I invite them to lunch, they’ll be too busy.❌ If I ask they how their day is, they’ll just say, “fine” and…
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“10 things the most successful people do every day.” Yeah, don’t copy those actions. OK, it’s true that getting different results does demand a change in behavior. But what behavior, exactly? And where does that behavior come from? It’s probably not whatever the latest list article is talking about. The things that we do flow…
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A few years ago I revisited the campus of my alma mater. My brain had a whirlwind of a time processing it. As I stood and gazed north, everything looked exactly as it had when I attended in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The same dorms. The same bell tower. The same cracks in…
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An AI chatbot tricked me into teaching it algebra this weekend. My son introduced me to chat.openai.com. I’ve been pretty impressed with the natural-language and literature-based responses it’s been able to give. Many of them are quite funny. I wanted to see how it would do with an algebra problem. It got surprisingly close to…
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I hear a voice in my head when I read silently. And this time it messed me up. The sentence was “People with anticipation plan to be significant.” But the voice in my head barely pronounced the word “plan.” And I understood a mere vision that “some day they’ll be significant just because they expect…
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Especially in the “scrappy startup” phase, business owners and high-performing leaders can’t afford to misuse their time. But sometimes the hours just get away from us. Meetings with other people become anchors on our calendars, but the rest of our time is discretionary. Investing each minute in the most productive way can be hard. The…
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As a new computer science graduate, I was ready to prove my value in the “real world” of software development. But I was in for a surprise. Tools and third-party libraries didn’t always behave the way one would expect. Documentation was sometimes unclear, incomplete, or just plain wrong. And sometimes, I mis-remembered what I had…
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“Ready, Aim, Fire.” Put those words in any other order and they sound like mockery. But they shouldn’t. 👉 “Ready, Fire, Aim!” is someone who makes hasty decisions without thinking. Or is it? 👉 “Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Aim, Fire!” is someone who suffers from analysis paralysis. Or is it? How much aiming should you…
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The entire production database had just been emptied out. And it was my fault. I had never been a database administrator, but I was sure I could do it. “You’ve got this,” I kept telling myself. I’m pretty good at mimicking experts. And it often serves me really well. This time, it didn’t. The pattern…
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A famous framework may actually make decisions harder for hyper-analytical folks like me. In 2015, Jeff Bezos described a “Type 1 vs. Type 2” framework for making decisions in his Letter to Shareholders. If you missed it, here’s a summary: 👉 Some decisions are consequential decisions that can’t be reversed. Bezos explained that these ”must…