Reading Zig Ziglar’s “Secrets,” I was amazed to find the story of the “Gloomy Gus” shoeshine man.
Seeing Zig approach the shoeshine station, Gloomy Gus asks “Well, I suppose you want the regular shine?” (as opposed to the “Best shine” or the “Spit shine” etc.)
Zig-(incredulously) “I can’t believe you said that! Why would you offer me [...]

A central tenet of Martial Arts is “Partners not Opponents.”
When you think of someone as a partner, there’s no aggression, no ego, no need to outperform. Instead, there’s teaching and learning, sharing to make each other better.
Working together like this helps both the skilled partner and the novice. The novice learns technique and skill through [...]

Two statements: same words, different lessons.
“Good is the enemy of great” and “Great gets in the way of good.”
If you operate at a good level and aren’t interested in overcoming the inertia it takes to be great, you’ll fall under the first category.
If you’re operating at a great level, but allow every detail to hold [...]

We all want to progress and improve. We all want success and to achieve goals that make us proud, and to help others around us.
That’s a really good thing.
In order to do those things, some days you just need to live. Be honest with yourself about your good intentions and forget how big the world [...]

Failure scares people. Rejection can be a painful experience. Many people are more scared to give a speech in front of their peers than they are of death itself. It seems ridiculous, but the reality is that for many many people, the anxiety associated with failure crippling.
The flipside (the Truth) is, if you embrace failure [...]

Hercules is strong. But like the rest of us, he needs help every now and again.
One day Hercules was outside and he saw a nasty-looking beast rear its head on the side of the road. He took his club and smashed the beast’s head. To his surprise, the beast grew three heads instead of one. [...]

As we refine our goals and come closer to picking one that meets our desires, fear sets in. Fear that we don’t know what the future holds. Fear that we don’t know what we want. Fear that we’ll pick wrong. These fears suck the creativity out of you. They feel horrible and “if you could [...]

“I’m going to learn how to swim,” I’ve been saying to friends for the last month. I’ve looked up classes, found out which one is the right level and price for me, and wrote down the pool schedule. Dug up my bathing suit. Even went to Tim Ferris’s blog to find [...]

In Nepal, the dogs bark all night long. Every 20 minutes or so they all stop at the same time and there’s an immense feeling of relief.
Then they start back up again.
Turns out the Nepali people don’t freak out, throw stones or beat the dogs into silence. They don’t do anything at all. They realize [...]

The “Doom Loop” is actually a defined business concept in Jim Collins Good to Great.
It’s when you:
a.) Find a new direction
b.) Enter a new program
c.) get a new leader
d.) start a new event
e.) react to a new fad
without having any plan of action, no accumulated momentum, no buildup, no direction. You then get disappointing results [...]