I haven’t posted on gu.e since early December. Though I don’t feel the need to defend myself, I would like to inform my faithful readers—all three of you—that I haven’t forgotten about the blog or stopped writing. About a week before Christmas I crunched some numbers and discovered that to meet my goal for the […]
In a recent post, I wrote about the importance of curiosity. Thomas Edison never would have gotten 1093 patents without a mountain of it. Another personality trait that I believe Edison must have had in abundance is optimism. I can’t speak for Edison’s day or his business colleagues, but I know more pessimists than optimists. […]
Of course, Thomas Edison’s perspiration wouldn’t have produced marketable incandescent light bulbs without some other factors. How did Thomas Edison keep that hard work effective even if he couldn’t have always been efficient? I think it’s safe to say that Edison worked very, very hard while building a team of brilliant, talented people. Or perhaps […]
A man who truly understood the importance of failing better, Thomas Edison is often credited with inventing the light bulb. He did not, in fact, invent the light bulb. If as many as twenty-two other inventors created an incandescent lamp, then why do we associate Edison with this ubiquitous invention? Historians make plenty of speculations, […]
In the middle of November, I gave a talk at TEDx Knoxville. My friend Alex Lavidge organized the event and invited me to speak. I was very excited and could still remember the first TED talk I had ever watched. It introduced me to William Kamkwamba, a boy from Malawi who used a book about […]
My friend Gregg let me borrow the Bloomgberg Businessweek edition celebrating the life of Steve Jobs. One Jobs quote from a 1996 Wired magazine interview struck me with its simplicity: “Creativity is just connecting things.†I think we often associate creativity with trying to dream up a new idea or piece together a solution to […]
For Fourth of July weekend, Megan and I drove up to Lake Erie in Ohio. We stopped for gas in one of those cute, if forgettable, towns with a row of storefronts on each side of the main drag and one traffic light. We laughed at a restaurant called Pizza Explosion. How could that name […]
Old news: everything can change in the blink of an eye. Back in March, I was talking to a client about an intense search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. I had put twenty hours into lunch meetings, phone calls, research, writing, and proposal preparation. I calculated the amount of hours needed to complete a particular project […]
This is a long post—one of my longest ever. I’m warning you up front because I want you to commit to reading the whole thing. Why? Because I share two of the most important lessons that I have ever learned, not just about taking initiative but about leading a deeply meaningful life. I thought about […]
