A favorite question my son likes to ask after we watch a movie is, “which character did you most identify with?” My response is usually based on similarities in age, role, and intent. As I have gotten older, I find myself relating much more to the character serving as a mentor than the younger protagonist making life altering decisions. Being able to see ourselves in the story greatly adds to the enjoyment and engagement of the experience. The inability to relate to the main character can also be a challenge in reading the biography of a historic figure or one who has been recognized for their superlative achievements….
Time management can generally be divided into to two broad topics; answering the big picture questions about life to address effectiveness (“are we doing the right thing?”) and exploring productivity or efficiency (“are we doing things right?”). Both are obviously important though the productivity concern may feel like the more pressing need for many. The burden of getting more done with our limited resource capacity confronts us as we start every working day and equally applies to our personal lives….
Uncovering the Mystery to Greatness
Book stores are full of titles promising to provide the guaranteed formula for achieving success. Usually there are five to ten action items cleverly phrased to make them memorable because they are basically common sense ideas. Ron Friedman in Decoding Greatness focuses more on the process for discovering the formula. The book’s subtitle reveals his recommended approach – “How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success….”
Predicting the future is both extremely valuable and practically impossible. The further out you aim your predictions, the more difficult it becomes. So when futurists take a stab at painting a picture fifty or a hundred years in the future, we pay less attention to the specifics and more to the direction and the possibilities. In Mauro Guillen’s book 2030 (published in 2020), he takes a more reasonable time frame of just a decade. Not surprisingly, his book projects today’s technological breakthroughs and demographic certainties and concludes that by 2030 foundations will be laid for a different trajectory….
Every March, college basketball in the US takes center stage with a series of conference, regional, and finally national championship tournaments. Typically, following each game there is a quick interview with the winning coach and a player who performed exceptionally well. The interviews generally offer an opportunity to share the joy of the victor and hear some well worn post game cliches….
Learning from the Past to Live a Better Future
In the 1999 science fiction comedy, Galaxy Quest, a key plot line revolves around the “Omega 13,” a device allowing the user a 13 second jump to the past to repair a single mistake. When I first watched the movie, I was initially underwhelmed with the benefit offered. How much could you change your life with a 13 second do over? And then I thought about all the harmful accidents that could be prevented or even the opportunity to have never spoken words in anger that seemed to forever change an important relationship….
One of the many memorable lines from the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is “Youth is wasted on the wrong people.” The line is delivered by an older man watching a young couple struggling to find the next step in their awkward romantic dance. As we get older and our ideas about the right way to do things become firmly entrenched, we sometimes forget how those ideas were formed. It is easy to believe you simply always thought that way. But if you think back carefully to those formative years of university and early adult life, you will probably recall a fairly messy process….
Anger seems to be a common emotion these days. If you aren’t angry about something you must not be paying attention. It is hard to watch a news broadcast and not feel like things are going in the wrong direction and it must be somebody’s fault. Who should receive the blame depends on who is doing the talking. While there is great difference of opinion on who is responsible, all sides share something in common, they are confident they know who to blame….
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