Renie Cavallari wrote an article recently for careerbuilder.com that contained some excellent advice for getting ahead at work. The key is to be willing to go the extra mile with a positive attitude and a smile on your face. This includes staying late if necessary to finish a project, helping clean up a mess even…
An article by Elizabeth Bernstein, which recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal, contained some excellent advice for being a good conversationalist. First, ask lots of questions. According to the article, “People love to talk about themselves and often will think you are a great conversationalist if you talk about them and not yourself.” For…
The lesson is this: “Treat your employees right and they’ll treat your customers right which, in turn, makes the business successful.” Recently, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines were rated numbers one and two respectively in terms of customer satisfaction and were head and shoulders above the rest of the airline industry. The reason is that the…
An article by Scott Stossel in a recent issue of The Atlantic reports on one of the longest-running longitudinal studies on human development. The study began in 1938 and followed the lives of 268 Harvard undergraduates (these were all men because Harvard wasn’t coed at the time) for 75 years. One of the most interesting…
Visiting with a sick friend can feel awkward and even stressful. We want to say the right things, but we’re sometimes not sure of what those right things are. I came across an article in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal which contains some sound advice on how to avoid insensitive or hurtful…
A friend of mine sent me this poem a few weeks ago. I enjoyed it so much that I want to pass it on to you. It’s titled The Art of Living. To touch the cup with eager lips and taste, not drain it;To woo and tempt and court a bliss – and not attain…
Recently, my wife shared an Aristotle quote with me about avoiding criticism: “Criticism is something we can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing and being nothing.” The lesson here is that if you live your life to avoid criticism, you’ll wind up living an empty and meaningless life.
Sometimes, when you’re pursuing your dream, the going gets tough. When this happens, it’s very tempting to say something like, “This is way too hard; maybe I should give up.” The problem with giving up is that achieving your dream might be just around the corner, but you’ll never know if you throw in the…
Whenever I ask people how they are going to deal with a particular problem if it were ever to occur in the future, the response you often hear is, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” In other words, I’ll deal with that problem if it occurs, but I don’t want to be…
The other night, I was watching a major league baseball player being interviewed on television after he had pitched a particularly good game. Early in his career, he had not pitched well and now he is pitching very well. When the interviewer asked him what it was that caused the change in his performance, he…