Get Your Email Habits In Order
“It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Natur und Kunst) You know the ETR rule on e-mail: Unless you are in the very unusual situation of being responsible for hourly deadlines (in which case you probably need to work your way up…
READ MOREWhat Is Your Valuable Skill? Are You A Master At It?
In all human endeavors, there are four levels of accomplishment: 1. Incompetence Regardless of how smart or gifted you are, to learn a new skill you must go through a period of not knowing — of taking the baby steps and stumbling. This is the very necessary stage of incompetence.…
READ MOREA Lesson Everyone Needs To Learn To Become A Success In Any Field
“The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.” – Charles Peguy DF, a friend and colleague, wrote me…
READ MOREThe Myth Of Positive Thinking
“In the arena of human life, the honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.” – Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 4th century B.C.) One of the most popular myths about success is the power of positive thinking. The idea, in a nutshell, is that you can…
READ MOREThe Myth Of Excellence, Or “What Are You, Anyway”
“The question should be, ‘Is it worth trying do?’ not ‘Can it be done?’” – Allard Lowenstein (The New York Times Book Review, November 7, 1993) Many years ago — before you were born, perhaps — JSN (my at-the-time boss and later-on partner) gave me an insight into business that…
READ MOREBanish Your Workday Distractions
“We’re all muddlers. The thing is to see when one’s got to stop muddling.” – Iris Murdoch (A Word Child, 1975) We’ve talked about why you need to (a) do mostly, if not only, important tasks and (b) focus on doing them well. We’ve examined the foolishness of multitasking and…
READ MOREHow To Gain Power By Being Mysterious
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850) In his Oracles, the 17th century Spanish writer and Jesuit priest Baltasar Gracian advises readers…
READ MOREFive Useful Principles of Persuasion
“Flattery’ll get you anywhere.” – Jane Russell (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) While salesmen and business leaders have developed and refined the skills of persuasion in their daily working lives, experimental psychologists have been studying it from the outside — trying to figure out what the principles are that can…
READ MORESorting Your Inbox Into Priority Files: Why It Doesn’t Work
MA, a new ETR reader, responded to my advice re organizing daily tasks according to Steve Covey’s four-quadrant principle. (The idea, in a nutshell, is that you should organize your life so that you give priority to Important but Not Urgent goals since they will make the biggest difference in…
READ MORENo More Excuses
“One unable to dance blames the unevenness of the floor.” – Malay proverb At any given time, I am individually mentoring a dozen or more individuals. It’s not something I seek to do. It seems to be the natural result of (a) knowing a lot of ambitious people and (b)…
READ MOREIf You Want That Better Job, Go After It Like You Mean It
“There is one quality more important than ‘know-how’ … This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.” – Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954) Yesterday (in Message #487), we talked about your career. I…
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