A way to assess where you are in your career and what to do — When I joined management consulting, one of the partners sat us down in a board room to walk us through the hourglass. An hourglass is wide at the bottom, narrow in the middle, and then wide at the top again. It’s a way of thinking about what to do at…

Leverage existing work, be a questioning sponge, learn from mistakes, actively make mistakes, and get feedback — I lucked into a job in a Big 4 company. I was mentoring a Toastmaster club and the club just happened to be full of Deloitte employees — as I helped the club, one of the members, a Senior Manager, asked if I had any interest in working for Deloitte…

What else can you do, creating playlist questions and using a ladder — In Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, the authors talk about the four ‘villains’ of decision making. One of these villains is narrowing your options. You have probably done this with one of your decisions. Should I move to a big city or stay in a small city? Should I…

Thinking like a fool can help ‘whack’ our typical thinking patterns into breakthrough ideas — From Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head: “Looking at the fool’s wildly-colored clothing and donkey-eared cap, it’s easy to regard him as a simpleton, an imbecile whose proverbial “elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor,” or a moron “whose bell has no…

Ten ‘rules’ a research physicist uses to come up with ideas and approaches for solving problems — I learned about Tom Hirschfield’s rules of thumb from A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech. In the book, Roger said that he received an unusual letter and found it to be from a research physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory named Tom Hirschfield. Tom wrote…

Treating work like a game, timeboxing and other ways to trick yourself into improved productivity — If you’re reading this article, you’re probably not doing work that challenges you. I’ve been there — moving data from a spreadsheet to a database or transferring text from images into Word. You need to do it. It’s not fun. It’s not something to brag about. …

Understanding a typical vs. an atypical day and being realistic about what you prioritize — Laura Vanderkam, in her great podcast Before Breakfast, talked about a study done asking participants to describe everything that they did yesterday. …

Most people have an operational or personal network but are missing the third — “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” — African proverb I’m often reminded of the above quote when I think about how to get ahead at work. No matter what you do for work, you likely need a network to succeed…

From someone that doesn’t like networking — Ten years ago, I didn’t like networking. Or rather, I didn’t like it because I’m not good at it. When I moved to the city I currently live in, I met a few people that Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh call “superconnectors” — these are individuals that seem to know…