by Jeremiah Miller | Uncategorized
Would your team march across a scorching desert to help you reach a goal?
One of the most important and most difficult things we must do as leaders is to motivate and create loyalty in the people we lead.
Many leaders try to solve this through talking. But pep talks are the five-hour energy drinks of motivation. They fire people up for a bit, then wear off. And as with caffeine, your team builds up a tolerance to your “come-to-Jesus” talks. They get less and less effective.
But there is another way.
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by Art Millington | Uncategorized
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…)
by Jeremiah Miller | Uncategorized
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…)
by Art Millington | Uncategorized
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…)
by Jeremiah Miller | Uncategorized
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…)
by Art Millington | Uncategorized
A few weeks back, I was in the doctor’s office waiting room with one of my children. I heard a father talking to his young daughter. She was teary-eyed because he had told her she had to get a shot. “It won’t hurt at all,” he told her. “You won’t even feel it.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of shot she was getting but I remember thinking to myself, “Bullshit!! Shots hurt.” Especially for a kid. (more…)
