Posts by Early To Rise
Empathetic Listening: Does It Really Pay?
“You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journals, 1836) You read so much about the importance of listening these days. Every social, academic, and, now, even every business guru is jumping on this bandwagon. The idea, in a nutshell,…
Read MoreLiving Rich – Eat Only Good Meals
“Dinner is to a day what dessert is to dinner.” – Michael Dorris (“The Quest for Pie,” Paper Trail, 1994) Food is fuel. So say some fitness gurus. “Give your body what it needs to run and nothing else. You’ll be healthier — and that’s the most important thing.” There are moments when…
Read MoreHow Do You Get the Hard Work Done if You Don’t Feel Tough?
“How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?” – Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, 1900) As I said yesterday, you need to be tough to get the hard work done. But what do you do if, like…
Read MoreHow To Get Rid Of A Cold…
“Microbes is a vigitable, an’ ivry man is like a conservatory full iv these potted plants.” – Finley Peter Dunne (“Christian Science,” Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, 1901) Getting a cold is a miserable experience. It feels lousy, and it can slow you down. When I have a cold, I feel so rotten that I sometimes ask…
Read MoreGood Manners: Nothing Is More Important
“We are all born charming, fresh, and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.” – Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”) I was complaining — not too long ago — about the bad manners of a friend of one of my sons. I was trying to explain why so many of…
Read MoreHow To Be A Great Houseguest
“Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.” – Charles Lamb (“Valentine’s Day,” Essays of Elia, 1823) Travel the world as you will, stay in beautiful places, eat great food, drink fine wine, and amuse yourself with the company of good friends.…
Read MoreCreating – And Sticking With – A Standard of Employee Excellence
“To me, one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate.” – Heraclitus (Fragments, c. 500 B.C.) In a memo to one of my clients, I recommended that he create a policy for promoting a standard of employee excellence that would include his eliminating the worst 15% of his employees every year. He didn’t…
Read MoreAnother Reason Less Is More
“Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson I’m reading a book about geniuses that includes a chapter on individuals who have put to memory an extraordinary number of facts. The authors of the book — one a grandmaster in…
Read MoreCustomers: Pay Attention To What They Do, Not What They Say They Do
“Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.” – B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity) According to a recent article in Forbes Small…
Read MoreA Lesson Everyone Needs To Learn To Become A Success In Any Field
“The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.” – Charles Peguy DF, a friend and colleague, wrote me last week with this message:…
Read MoreIf You Want That Better Job, Go After It Like You Mean It
“There is one quality more important than ‘know-how’ … This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.” – Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954) Yesterday (in Message #487), we talked about your career. I suggested that if you want…
Read MoreDo You Want A Better Job?
“Every man is the architect of his own fortune.” – Sallust (speech to Caesar, first century B.C.) Few of us are entirely happy with our current work — and if we are for a while, eventually some of it, at least, becomes ho-hum. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a better job, even if (a) you’re…
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