We Know How to Improvise

My 4 year old daughter has a life threatening egg and nut allergy. We discovered it when she was about 10 months old when we gave her a piece of egg to eat. She broke out in a horrible rash, vomited, turned blue and passed out. I didn’t know if she was alive in the ambulance that was rushing her to the Emergency Room that day. She survived and is fine but now has to live with a constant fear […]

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5 Ways to Deal With Uncertainty at Work

“Will I have a job in 6 months?” was the question that kept me up many nights. For some time, I went through the gut wrenching stress and anxiety of trying to deal with uncertainty at work especially where things would come out of left field almost constantly. Unable to deal with uncertainty and chaos at work, I froze and became paralyzed by over thinking about what I thought was going to happen next. I just couldn’t deal with uncertainty […]

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Tears in Her Chair Keep Her Moving Forward

My wife is an Optometrist (an eye doctor) and has a practice she started at the height of the economic doom and gloom in October 2008. Since she began, she has dealt with uncertainty in the economy, hiring problems, surprises by competition and the day to day chaos of running a small business. As her practice grew, she noticed an interesting phenomenon every now and again: Patients crying in her chair. And it wasn’t a result of eye drops. For […]

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More is Not Necessarily Better When Deciding to Move Forward

I used to be one of those people who was in awe of the choices we have all around us. “Give me more information”, I used to say. From my career to my life at home, I used to utilize information – lots of it – to make any decision, small or big. I needed options driven by data to figure out which way to go in an uncertain and unpredictable environment. I figured the more you know about something, […]

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Where Ideas Come From: My Conversation with an Ad Man

I was curious about something: Can good ideas emerge in uncertain times amidst uncertainty and chaos? I have a simple theory that some of life’s best ideas, best opportunities and greatest successes emerge during times of unpredictability, uncertainty and chaos. My gut tells me that the complexity of today’s world, chaos at work, chaos at home, is not all that bad. That there must be a silver lining somewhere in there. So I asked someone who is in the creative […]

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