NEWSLETTER

How Collective Experiences Add Magic To Life
Hey everyone! I hope that you had an amazing week.
It’s that time of year again! Superbowl Sunday.
You may wonder why on earth I am talking about the Superbowl. What the heck does that have to do with the usual topics of building a meaningful career, with living an amazing life?
I am a huge believer in the idea of rituals and traditions, believing that they are important tools in making sure that we note the passage of time. Events like the…

Hey everyone!
I hope you had an amazing week and rested and recharged over the weekend. It was so cold here in Ottawa, Canada, over the last couple of days. The cold has kept me cooped up inside way more than usual; I don’t want to wander too far from the cozy fire in the wood stove.
But life is full of seasons; different times call for different ways of being. I try to embrace each moment and encourage you to do the same.
Fully embracing each moment requires that you act with intention,…

Hi everyone! I hope that you all had an amazing week.
Every Sunday I send you 3 things; an article about the world of work, an inspiring quote, and a journal prompt that encourages personal reflection. My goal is to help you redefine the relationship you have with your work, making it something that serves you rather than something you tolerate (or worse) dread.
A member of the community inspired the idea for the major piece of content in this week’s newsletter. He confided to me he had…

Hi everyone! I hope that you all had an amazing week.
Every Sunday I send you 3 things; an article about the world of work, an inspiring quote, and a journal prompt that encourages personal reflection. My goal is to help you redefine the relationship you have with your work, making it something that serves you rather than something you tolerate (or worse) dread.
Please share this with a friend if you find it useful!
As always, feedback is welcome; just respond to this email. I love to hear…

Hey everyone!
Hope that you all had an amazing weekend, and that you found some time to recharge your batteries and to do something interesting. All too often we forget that the whole point of weekends is to reset, to play, to connect with others. They shouldn’t just be the time slot that we push all of our personal chores into.
Let’s dive in to this week’s content!
Want Amazing Results? Work More Consistently, Not Harder.
Progressing slowly but steadily is the key to achieving big goals….

Happy New Year everyone!
I hope that you all had a fantastic holiday season and that you are eager and ready to tackle 2023. I know I am excited about what the year has in store!
I look forward to helping as many of you as possible achieve your career goals for 2023. Doing work that you love and excel is what allows us to flourish as a society; having more people fully engaged in their work and doing work that matters to them is critical to our collective success.
Thanks for reading. I know…

How Helping Others Can Make You Better
An excellent article on HBR highlights some research that I found interesting and useful. If you have followed me for some time, you know I don’t like the idea of “work-life balance”. Work plays a role in the one life we have. While we are working, we are living. You get the idea.
Conflict at home will invariably spill into the workplace (or vice versa), since there is no real distinction or separation between work life and the rest of life.
The research…

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year – For Reflection
For me, the month of December is a special month. It is time to connect with family and friends. A time to share fantastic food and some thoughtful gifts. It is also a time to go inside., both physically and metaphorically.
Where I live, it gets dark very early. And the weather is typically cold and snowy (although not so much this year). This means that I spend a bit more time inside, sitting downstairs by the fire crackling in my…

Explode Into 2023 By Rocking The Next Month
Don’t let the year just fade out and away.
I can’t believe it is already December. The year has literally flown by. Time seems to pass ever quicker as we age.
It being December means that there is 1 month left in the year (thanks Captain Obvious!). And December means a lot of gatherings with colleagues, family, and friends. Having time to connect with the people that are important to us is so important, and we should enjoy it.
But danger lurks….

How to build your dream career, step by step
Take a longer-term view.
Many people look at their career over too short of a time horizon. It is very helpful to zoom out, taking a longer term view. Because in reality, your career path will probably be winding and non-linear. And your career will be with you for a long time.
It is best to think of your career as something that you will continue to do for most of your life. Even once you “retire”, you will still need to spend your time making…

How To Deal With Sh!t That Derails Your Plans
Sh!t happens. Sorry, it just does.
Failure is an inevitable part of life. The author of the famous Harry Potter book series, J. K. Rowling, articulated it so well in a 2008 speech at Harvard;
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all; in which case, you fail by default.”
Brilliantly said.
If you are reading this, there is a high probability that you are…

The Amazing Power of the Word “and”
Be uniquely you.
In the current career advice / self-development world, it is very difficult not to stumble across the “follow your passion” advice. Which, for the record, I feel can be quite harmful advice. Not that you should not be doing work that you enjoy doing and are good at, but you need to ensure that there is an actual market demand for what you want to do.
The idea behind the advice to “follow your passion” is to take an activity that you enjoy…

Work. What Is It Good For?
Here’s a crazy question for you; “Why do you work?”
The answer that almost everyone provides when asked this question is “to make money”. Which is fair. After all, we need to buy food to eat, to pay for shelter, and to purchase our way through daily life.
But it is a superficial answer. Because if you go a level deeper, and think about why you want to earn MORE money (as almost everyone does), you think about all the amazing things you would do, if only you had more…

You won’t be here forever. So live intentionally.
I just returned from Portugal. I spent the last 18 days exploring the beautiful sites, history, and culture along with my wife and her mother. It was so enjoyable! There are so many interesting things to see and explore, and so much history.
One town that we visited was Évora. While there we visited the “Capela dos Ossos” (“Chapel of Bones”). This site blew me away.
It is a chapel that was constructed and decorated with the bones of thousands…

The Gift Of Presence: The Secret To Living A Great Life.
I decided to do something a bit differently this week, as a poem that I came across inspired me. The poem was called “The Life of a Day” written by Tom Hennen.
The Life of a Day
Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more…

How To Create The Future You Dream Of
Are you happy with your life? I mean, are you really satisfied with how things are going for you?
If you are like a lot of people, the answer is probably a resounding “hell, no!”. And that really is too bad.
Because if you are not happy with your life today, when will you be happy? Tomorrow? The day after? When you get a new job? When you retire?
Living like that SUCKS. I know; been there, done that. Life is way too short to live that way.
But I also know…

Having “Bad Days” Are Important To Living A Meaningful Life
Life is not just about finding joy and pleasure.
We devote so much of our time and energy in seeking joy and pleasure. After all, we want to live well!
But without the “downs”, there are no “ups”.
No one wants to experience sadness, grief, pain, or boredom. But the thing is, you can’t have joy, gratitude, satisfaction, and the other positive emotions without having the opposites as well. They are two-sides of the same coin; they…

The Trap of an Amazing Job Title
Don’t Let Your Ego Make Decisions For You
This morning I was reading an article by the prolific Tim Denning that really resonated with me. It resonated with me so deeply, as I have found myself in this exact situation. And over the course of my career, I have noticed that most people get caught up in this game.
We let our ego and our need for recognition drive our career goals.
This is insanity. But it is also normal.
Our society has conditioned us to always…

Why you never “feel like” doing what you need to do
So many of us have it all backwards and we really end up hurting our long-term progress. We procrastinate on doing the things that we know that we really should do, the things that actually matter to our success. We tell ourselves that we will get to it after lunch. And then someone books a meeting, we end up on another phone call, and then we just “don’t feel like” doing the task. So it will wait until tomorrow.
Guess what happens then? We…

Let Your Sense of Play Lead You
There is a real shift in workplace dynamics happening lately. People are (rightly!) questioning whether they want to remain at their job, or if the “grass is greener” somewhere else. There is a lot of pressure for companies to keep quality employees, giving those employees greater power to negotiate how they work. And that is great; the world of work has been broken for so many people for so long now. Time for change.
But – so much career advice centres around…

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of discussion online around the idea of “quiet quitting”, which seems to be a sort of evolution of “The Great Resignation”. I previously made a case here that the “Great Resignation” was actually more of an awakening by employees, a realization that better was possible for them. Mostly, people were not leaving the workforce; they were shifting into jobs that more aligned with their goals. Which is a great thing!
Our collective every day…

It is Labour Day weekend here in North America, which signals a period of real transition. It marks the end of summer. The kids return to school. The cooler weather sets in (at least in my neck of the woods). It is a time for us to recommit to the journey that we are all on, the quest to do nothing less than to live the best life possible.
Even though it has been many moons since I have been in school, the shift into autumn still invokes the feeling of embarking on a journey of learning and…