Take Your Eyes Off The Prize

Take Your Eyes Off The Prize

Losing 20 pounds in less than a day isn’t that big of a deal to me. As a wrestler and a fighter, I’ve cut that much weight dozens of times. It involves hours of intense exercise and not eating or drinking anything.

Not that it was real weight loss. As soon as I made the required weight, I gained it all back and then some. Cutting weight is not the same as losing weight. Cutting weight through exercise and dehydration is a temporary solution designed to hit the specific goal of passing the pre-match weigh-in. It is definitely not good for you and in the long run probably makes healthy weight loss more difficult. (more…)

Three Ways You Can Be More Strategic

Three Ways You Can Be More Strategic

My five-year-old nephew beats me at cards sometimes. We play “War.” We face off and flip cards. The player with the higher card wins. We keep going until one of us has all the cards. It is completely random and involves no decisions, and therefore no strategy. He wins sometimes. I win sometimes.

Contrast this with chess. Chess is all decisions and no random chance. In fact, each turn a player might have to choose from six good moves.. That means over the course of a typical game, a player would make 1077 decisions. That is roughly the number of particles in the observable universe.

Where there are decisions, there can be strategy. (more…)

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Expectations

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Expectations

When I was a police officer, I had a partner. She came from another agency where she had been the first female member of their SWAT team and a detective. By the time I met her, she had done way more as a cop than I ever would. She was one of the three or four people in my career that really wanted to teach me how to be a better cop. When we worked together, I often deferred to her knowledge and experience. (more…)

How To Get Really Good At Saying “No”

How To Get Really Good At Saying “No”

You say “yes” way too often.

One of the reasons Americans lead busy lives, running from one thing to another, stressed out, doing just enough to get the job done but not really excelling at anything, is that we say yes too much.

I fall into the same trap. Between client work, business development opportunities, time with my wife, fitness, friends, oh and sleep, my life can get full in a minute. I can tell it’s happened when I wake up in the middle of the night, remembering something I was supposed to do or a meeting I missed. (more…)