How to Get People to Help You In 1743, a newly elected member of the Pennsylvania Assembly stood up and attacked Benjamin Franklin's character in a speech before the entire chamber. Franklin had barely met the man. He had done nothing to provoke him. The usual response to a public hit like that is silence, a matching insult, or years of quiet distance between the two people involved. None of those appealed to Franklin. He had heard his new rival owned a rare, hard-to-find book, the kind a...
3 days ago • 4 min read
The Boring Secret Behind Every Successful Person Twyla Tharp has won a Tony, two Emmys, and built more than 130 dances across a sixty-year career. Every morning she wakes at 5:30, pulls on her workout clothes, walks outside her Manhattan home, and hails a cab to a gym on the Upper East Side. Then she trains for two hours. Ask her what the most important part of that routine is, and the answer is not the training. In her book The Creative Habit, she writes that the ritual is not the stretching...
7 days ago • 4 min read
Everyone Feels Like a Fraud. Here's What to Do About It. Maya Angelou wrote eleven books. She was nominated for a Pulitzer and won several Grammys. And every single time she sat down to face a blank page, the same thought showed up first: "Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out." Read that again. One of the most celebrated writers of the last century spent her career quietly waiting to be exposed as an imposter. If the feeling...
10 days ago • 3 min read
How to Hear "You Were Bad" Without Feeling Like a Loser Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, had just finished a meeting with a big potential client. He thought it went fine. Then an email landed from one of his own employees, Jim Haskel. The message was short. Haskel told his boss, the founder of one of the largest hedge funds in the world, that he deserved a D- for his performance. He said Dalio had rambled, failed to prepare, and burned forty-five minutes of everyone's time....
14 days ago • 3 min read
What to Do When Everything Falls Apart In August 2009, a 37-year-old engineer named Brian Acton was out of work. He had spent eleven years at Yahoo. He applied to Twitter and got turned down. A few weeks later he applied to Facebook, and they rejected him too. He could have spiraled. Instead, he opened Twitter and wrote, "Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure." That next adventure was WhatsApp. Five...
17 days ago • 3 min read
How to Handle Workplace Conflict Like a Professional In July 1863, Abraham Lincoln sat down to write one of the angriest letters of his life. The Union had just won at Gettysburg. General George Meade had Robert E. Lee's army trapped against a flooded river, with a real chance to end the war right there. Meade hesitated. Lee slipped away. When the news reached Washington, Lincoln was furious. He picked up his pen and let Meade have it, spelling out exactly how badly the general had blown the...
21 days ago • 4 min read
The Why Most People Are Terrible at Giving Feedback Sheryl Sandberg had just watched Kim Scott present to the founders of Google. It went well. The room was pleased, the numbers landed, and Scott walked out feeling like she had nailed it. Then Sandberg offered to walk her back to her office. On the way she mentioned a few things she liked. Then she added that Scott had said "um" a lot. Scott waved it off as a small verbal tic. Sandberg tried again, a little more directly. Scott brushed it off...
24 days ago • 3 min read
The Leader Nobody Sees: How to Lead Without Authority John Maxwell once said something worth taping to your desk: "Leadership is influence. Nothing more. Nothing less." That single sentence kills the biggest myth about leadership. The myth that you need a title to lead. That you need direct reports, a corner office, or "manager" in your email signature to actually make things happen at work. You do not. Walk into any office and watch closely for one week. Notice who people actually listen to....
28 days ago • 4 min read
How to Build a Reputation Before You Have Experience Warren Buffett once said something that everyone quotes but very few people actually act on. "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." People read that quote, nod, and move on. They assume reputation is something you start worrying about later, after you have a few promotions, a fancier title, or some real experience behind you. That’s an expensive mistake...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read