Our lives are the choices we make — and those choices aren’t always obvious.
Luckily, there are signs all around us showing us what we need to do, where we need to go, and guiding us in the right direction.
But in order to figure our lives out, we have to pay attention.
We have to pay attention to the inputs that surround us and decipher the messages they have for us.
Here are a few things worth more of our attention.
Eight questions to ask at the end of the day.
“Whoever your boss is, or your bosses are, they have 20% of their job that they just don’t like. So if you can ask them or figure out what that 20% is, and figure out a way to do it for them, you’ll make them really happy, improve their quality of life and their work experience.”
“Pressure is not stress. But the former is converted to the latter when you add one ingredient: rumination, the tendency to keep rethinking past or future events, while attaching negative emotion to those thoughts.”
“I will listen to you. Your experience at work, in previous jobs, at home, and in the community are valid. You know things that I don’t know. Your perspective on our work together is invaluable and can only enrich our product. I want to learn from you.”
“Perhaps the biggest disservice done by the outsize glorification of ‘leadership skills’ is to the practice of leadership itself — it hollows it out, it empties it of meaning. It attracts those who are motivated by the spotlight rather than by the ideas and people they serve. It teaches students to be a leader for the sake of being in charge rather than in the name of a cause or an idea they care about deeply.”
“Once other people start telling you what they like via Like buttons, you inevitably start hewing to their idea of what’s good. The stuff you publish will start looking a lot like the stuff that everybody else publishes, because everybody sort of likes the same thing and everybody is fishing for Likes.”
“When a problem keeps manifesting in an organization or relationship you need to resolve it, and that begins by putting it into words. But purposeless complaining can just as easily be a way to avoid moving on.”
“Shocking rules — particularly when you get into a company — end up being the important thing because people have to question, they have to ask themselves why does this rule even exist in order to change their behavior.”
“Employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect.”