advice

Advice: Don’t Take Things Personal

One Thing#Newsflash: You can’t make all your stakeholders, friends, colleagues (all the people you know or don’t know) happy all the time.

As professionals, we talk a lot about listening and looking at issues from multiple angles. Those are really important lessons that keep coming up in my career, but lately, there’s a bigger lesson I have learned:

Try not to take all that happens to you as a personal indication of your value or potential. 

If you dig deep enough you will be able to connect the dots in your past and realize that everything that happens to you is for your own good. You are exactly where you need to be right now. All the things that have happened to you HAVE HAPPENED. You can’t change the past and you do not know the future – but you have NOW.

What is the next thing you can do to move your goals forward? Have a big dream, but just focus on doing one little thing that gets you closer. Do that one little thing – that if left undone, you would regret not trying at all. Do one little thing for yourself.

#ChooseYourself #WhosLookingOutForYou #IfNotNowWhen

One Thing Well

Study, Reflect, Copy, Express….

It may he hard for anyone to reconcile the context and content of this post with the name of my blog, but sometimes you just have to go with the things that move you.

I’ve written before about my admiration for speeches and writings of certain figures in history. I may never know everything about the people I so admire, but the some of the things they say have had a profound effect on making me a better version of myself.

This speech by Oprah at the 2018 Golden Globes is no exception. It speaks to much of what’s happening in the current zeitgeist, but also addresses many issues we deal with on a personal level. It speaks volumes to me about leadership and speaking truth to power.

I hope it inspires you to be more.

Thanks go to NBC for posting this video to Youtube.

Failure is A Milestone on The Road to Success

I read something from Theodore Roosevelt today that profoundly inspires me. I know it will do the same for any professional in luxury, or any industry at all. I’m going to keep this one close to the chest.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

– Excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic”
Delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910