How to Live Well on Less (A Short Rant)

Twitter is such a wonderful source of information for catalyzing conversations.  This post stems from a post linked to by someone on my Twitter follow list.  I don’t know who posted it, I just saw the title, got thinking, and now you have this… I think the idea of “living well with less” is terribly flawed. First, it presupposes that you should have more.  Perhaps even that you deserve, or...

Using Google Alerts to Find Jobs, Rare Products, etc.

I’ve helped two people with this so far, and they seem to appreciate it.  So here it is for you, too. Since Google Alerts added the ability to send alerts to feeds, the world got a lot easier…at least in my book. (I had started writing an email parser for Google Alerts…now I don’t have to.) What I love about Google Alerts is that it lets me do research without doing any work.  The research...

A Lesson in Winning…from Elementary School

Just like any suburban-american kid growing up in the 80s, we had bake sales, cake walks, and 739 other elementary school fundraisers named after sweets our mothers didn’t want us to have. Often, these events would have drawings for prizes. It was very simple. You buy a ticket.  Then you put your ticket into the bucket in front of the item you wanted to win. Organizers hold a drawing, choose a ticket, then...

Personal Social Awareness: Defining Aware, Considerate, and Respectful

As a note: I am qualifying “Personal” here, because “Social Awareness” has become a significant conversation in the corporate space.  This blog post will talk about the social awareness that an individual has, not an organization.  However, these principles do fundamentally apply to corporate social awareness. The fundamental principle of Personal Social Awareness is very simple: Personal...

Business Entertainment Literature

If you read a lot of business books, chances are that you are reading a lot of Business Entertainment Literature. Big deal, right? Well, it is, depending on what you think you are reading. The Promise of Business Entertainment Literature Business entertainment literature makes only one promise: entertainment. It does not promise to make you smarter, affect your education, or make your knowledge more useful. The...