ROADTRIP!

Your battle cry.

You have a great idea — you and your closest friends are going to jump in a car and drive to a place that none of you have been before. Just to make it exciting — this place might not even exist! You heard this little town called Glory once at a party and thought it would be great to see if you could find it. Glory is a mini-paradise, a Shangri-La-like little town in the mountains not too far from where you live.

You and your friends are excited and start prepping as much as…

I get asked a lot about how to create a culture of innovation.

If you search for “How to create a culture of innovation” you’ll get a huge list of articles, blog posts, methodologies, and tales from the trenches.

I like to simplify things, so, here’s my post to add to the confusion.

Corporate culture is really nothing more than the ongoing behaviours of the people within the organization. …

Newton’s First Law

An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

When you’re creating a new product or service you must think really (really) hard about this law. You’re going to need to find a way to BE the unbalanced force that acts against that object.

Change. Is. Hard.

Most customers will keep doing what they are doing even when better alternatives are presented to them. …

I nap.

I nap every single day. Sometimes twice a day!

I don’t nap because I’m lazy.

I nap because I want to get more done — lots more done.

I nap because I’m committed to my work and my family and I want to be the best version of me.

I’ve been napping since my first year of university. I started having this feeling like my brain was full — a feeling I couldn’t suppress with coffee. I would take every opportunity I could get to grab a 10-minute snooze. I would nap in the hallways of the university…

There’s one characteristic of an Innovator that seems to define them.

Innovators love to solve problems.

I mean.. they really love to solve problems.

To an Innovator, solving a problem is a compulsion. They are compelled by curiosity. They are compelled by the challenge. They can’t stop themselves. It’s the most natural thing in the world for them to do, and they are good at it.

An Innovator can’t stand to the side and point at a problem and say “yup.. there’s a problem” and then walk away. …

I think the word “success” is overused and misinterpreted.

With that in mind, let me first start by clarifying what I mean by success.

Success means you have achieved a goal that you have deliberately set out to accomplish.

If you start a marathon and then finish it in the time you had hoped to finish it within then in my definition, you would be successful. If you set out to lose 20lb in 6 months, and you lose 20lb in 6 months, you are successful. …

“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill

[men-tawr, -ter] — noun

a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.

an influential senior sponsor or supporter.

That definition has never done it for me.

In my experience, mentors are different.

… they are different than leaders

… they are different than managers

… they aren’t trainers

… they aren’t teachers in the traditional sense

… they aren’t consultants either

They are different because their motivations are different.

They are different because they choose to work with you and not for…

Have you ever wondered why we sleep?

I’ve always found it really strange. It seems that sleeping would have evolved out of the human race by natural selection by this point.

Think about it.

When we’re sleeping, we are just lying there… unconscious, unable to respond to danger. Wouldn’t sleeping make it super simple for those lurking saber-toothed tigers to eat us?

The reason sleep didn’t evolve out probably means that there is a pretty damn good reason for it.

With that said, our society doesn’t seem to put a lot of emphasis on sleep. …