“An excuse is worse than a lie, for an excuse is a lie, guarded.” –Alexander Pope “Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” –George Washington Carver I don’t remember much about my first day at West Point. It was a blur of going here and there, reporting … Read more
“Persuasion is often more effectual than force.” –Aesop A few of you know that I went to law school for a year at the University of Virginia. It only took a year for me to decide that spending days upon days in law firm libraries was not the life I’d envisioned it to be (or … Read more
“There’s a sucker born every minute.” –Michael Cassius McDonald I use Google as the host for my e-mail. I pay a very low price for their business apps, and in exchange for the low price, I get to see their ads. Usually, I ignore the ads because I’ve gotten used to them over the years … Read more
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” –Frank Zappa “Everybody has a price.” –Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase When the founders of our company had our first corporate strategic planning retreat, we laid out this grandiose idea of growing to an immense size and having a company full of people who … Read more
“Knowing what you aren’t is just as important as knowing what you are.” –Me I recently received an e-mail from someone who had a significant amount of debt and wondered if I was the right person to work with them. In short, the answer is no. You’re better off spending your limited resources on a … Read more
“You don’t win…on accident. You win…on purpose.” –Lewis Howes “Work smarter and work harder.” –Me There are no silver platter trees in the world. Yet, it seems that a lot of people have this belief that successful people just magically became successful. Or that the government owes them something simply because they happened to be … Read more
10 points if you can name the movie where the title comes from! If you’ve ever been on a diet, you probably have suffered through the hunger pangs associated with the caloric reduction your stomach is experiencing. “FEED ME!” your stomach (and Monkey Brain) yell at you. By the way, Monkey Brain is what I … Read more
“Life is always at some turning point.” –Irwin Edman I read the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell a few years back. In it, he posited the theory that if you work at something for 10,000 hours, you become an expert. While the notion of 10,000 hours of work serving as the barrier to expertise has … Read more
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” –Dale Carnegie When we moved to Fort Worth, Texas from Virginia, one of the first things that I did was join a couple of local business … Read more
“Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.” –George Burns It’s pretty well known that we’d rather have pleasure now than pleasure later. A whole self-help industry popped up in the 1980s based on the notion of delaying gratification and the benefits of doing so rather than giving into our … Read more