To Be More Effective, Simplify Your Message
“The confused mind says no.” You’ve heard this before, right? It means that, when faced with too many options, the brain doesn’t make any decision and simply shuts down. This is why you will often see...
View ArticleAre You Ready For Your Emergency Landing?
“Your engine just quit. Where are you going to land?” The voice came from the right-hand seat—the co-pilot’s seat. Sounds dramatic, right? Actually, it was quite routine. The person in the right-hand...
View ArticleThe #1 Question Your Team Is Asking When Under Pressure
“Is it safe?” If you’ve ever seen the movie Marathon Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, you know just how scary this question can be. It can be a scary question for your team as well...
View ArticleThe 3 Magic Questions To Unlock Your Creative Thinking
Your business is dying. Okay, that may not technically be true. It was meant to be a “grabber.” That said, it might be true. You see, any business that isn’t continually coming up with creative...
View ArticleWhy Your External Pressure Is Really Internal Pressure
You’ve felt the pressure, haven’t you? There’s the clock. Just hanging up there on the wall, silently mocking you with its impending deadline. There’s your team, watching you, judging you, wondering if...
View ArticleThese Five Traits Will Make You A More Creative Thinker
Quickly now—what do these things all have in common: The iPhone The Taj Mahal Gluten-free bread Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band The Golden Retriever Give up? They are all outcomes of creative...
View ArticleWhy You Need To Let The Blocks Fall Down Go Boom
I think my friend Steve made a mistake. Steve was a high school friend of mine. Unlike me, he chose to breed just a few years after high school. I remember visiting him when his first-born was maybe...
View ArticleThe Joy of Deadlines (for Fun and Profit)
In the early days, I would panic. Friday night. The day before show day. 24 hours from now every seat in the TV studio will be filled, and a million more viewers will be watching the show on...
View ArticleWhy Fixing a Problem Isn’t Always the Best Solution
“Let it go!” That was the sole message of an acclaimed keynote speech that my colleague Joe Calloway delivered at the annual convention of the National Speakers Association some years ago. Let it go....
View ArticleWhat It Really Takes for You to Be in the Hall of Fame
This is going to sound like bragging (because, let’s be honest—it is), but I was recently inducted into the Professional Speaker Hall of Fame. It’s kind of a big deal in my industry, because there are...
View ArticleHow to Win Against Your Competition
I’ve been doing homework for the past week or so. I’ve been doing homework because in a little over a week, I’ll be attending a business development workshop, and the workshop leader gave us the...
View ArticleHow to Be the Idea Person on Your Team
Are all of your dots the same color? I talk about dots a lot. That’s because dots are the key to innovation, creativity, and breakthrough thinking. Most people get this wrong. They think that...
View ArticleYou Don’t Have to Change the World to Be an Innovator
If I were to ask you to name an innovation, what would you say? The iPhone? The Tesla? The Internet? Maybe not any of those three. But the odds are that whatever you name would be a biggie. Something...
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How to Come Up With Breakthrough Ideas
Do you want to know where breakthrough ideas really come from? I’ll give you a clue: they don’t come from some lightning bolt in the sky. Breakthrough ideas, almost invariably, are found at the...
View ArticleHow to Cultivate a Disruption Mindset
Disruption. It’s more than just a corporate buzzword. It’s the new way of the world. Amazon did it with retail. Uber did it with transportation. Apple did it with phones and other devices. Disruption,...
View ArticleThe Difference Between Breakthrough Thinkers and the Rest of Us
We all run into obstacles. Maybe it’s a business change that we don’t like; a traffic jam when we’re already late; a system or process that feels overly cumbersome. But we all run into obstacles. And...
View ArticleWhy You Need More Distractions in Your Life
I grew up in the shadow of an Amish dairy farm (depending on where the sun was, of course) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Now, if you’ve spent as much time around the Amish as I have, you know that...
View ArticleHow to Be the Disruptor and Not the Disrupted
You’ve heard of FOMO, right? Fear Of Missing Out. It’s why we’re addicted to Facebook and Instagram and all the rest. It’s why we tell our devices to notify us the instant anything happens anywhere in...
View ArticleHow to Become a Breakthrough Thinker in Two Easy Steps
In a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world, the next breakthrough idea wins. Depending on how you feel about #innovation, #creativity, and #breakthrough thinking, you may find this...
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