To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you. When we are hurt by others our natural instinct is to pull away, become angry, resentful, bitter and even vengeful. We normally do not respond with mercy, grace, understanding and forgiveness. Forgiveness is a choice. It is a gift that you…
Book Review: Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark
This is a good book. I loved it. I didn't know much about Jack Ma except that he is one of the wealthiest if not the thee wealthiest entrepreneur in China. This book is an engrossing, insider’s account of how a teacher built one of the world’s most valuable companies, rivaling Walmart & Amazon, and…
The Advantage of Disadvantages: Big fish in a small pond
Which one would you rather be? A BIG FISH in a small pond or a small fish in a BIG POND? A star performer in a startup or a team-member in a big company? A popular person in a small community or an ordinary person a big community The likely answer is: to be a…
The Advantage of Disadvantages: Suffering
Does dyslexia come with hidden advantages? Since dyslexia is a learning disability it's counterintuitive. But some of the world's most accomplished people [Steven Spielberg, Mohammed Ali, Pablo Picasso, Richard Branson] despite being dyslexic. Dyslexia, in the best of cases, forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. In his fascinating book David and Goliath,…
The Advantage of Disadvantages: Hunger to go on.
In his last TED Talk, Elon Musk says: "You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it." Why is it that certain nations, or people achieve…
The Advantage of Disadvantages: Comfort zones
We often look at having less [scarcity] as a disadvantage and having more [abundance] as an advantage. Therefore we all want to have more. More money, more opportunities, more stuff, more popularity, more followers, more clothes, more. But the problem with having more, for instance, having more money, often stifles our thinking. When a person…
The Advantage of Disadvantages: small is the new BIG
When I finished my trainee accountant articles at a big firm, I was happy that I will have a big firm on my resume. The advantage of having a big prestigious firm on your resume is deemed as priceless. It is something that most young aspiring accountants, lawyers, architects, engineers and other professionals wants on…
Your art is to heal…
Creative people deliver their work because they seek to complete something, to heal something, to change something for the better. To move from where they are now to a more centered, more complete place. You do not get creative once everything is okay. In fact, we are creative because everything is not okay (yet).
Not a trick question
Freedom is not about being without constraints or without responsibility. That is not freedom. No, the freedom I'm referring to is the willingness to step outside of the social constraints that bind us to others' opinion of us and do that which we were born to do, that makes a difference, that changes the course…
Show Up: Keep walking…
Before Van Gogh was Van Gogh, he painted some pictures of streets in Ramsgate, a village in the UK. What if he had stopped, saying: "This is not good enough, it is a failure, I'm never going to amount to anything?" Nobody, ever once, pops to the top. You walk there. Step by step, each…
Show Up: Jewelry for the people’s minds
Tom Waits says, as a songwriter, he makes ‘jewelry for the inside of people’s minds.’ So that is what all artists do, those in creative spaces: mental jewelry-making. You are not a heart surgeon. Your bad piece of art is not going to kill a person. You are not in charge of the lives of…
Show Up: Amazing will find you on the way
Does writer's block or creatives's block exist or it is a myth? What we call writer's block or creatives's block is actually a symptom of something else. I don’t believe that it is a stand-alone psychological disorder. Creatives’s block is a symptom, usually, of some other actual psychological challenge [depression, anxiety, narcissism, alcoholism, extreme competitiveness,…