“It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity...

“An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.” -- Samuel Smiles I, like many Americans, am (or have been in most contexts)an instant gr...

When I was younger I worked with a group of people who worked for a large corporation. There was a woman I met who really needed my help. She spoke in an excruciating monotone. It’s hard to get this across in writing, but basically it sounded like a ...

It is incredibly easy for moisture to invade your home. Most people think that if they live in a relatively dry climate that they won't have to worry about things like basement waterproofing systems (or any waterproofing at all). What surprises these peop...

I started my career in sales. After having been in sales for a couple of years and I was excelling quickly so they made me a closer. I would be the guy that when the sales person was missing his or her mark, I would come in and try to still get the sale...

Have you ever noticed that some people seem to achieve goal after goal and others can't seem to achieve anything? Part of what holds people back in their lives and in persuasion is that they clutter their minds with static and chatter, inane or unnecessar...

Are we all having a group hallucination? And if we are, why are we hallucinating that there's a recession instead of something nice? Not too long ago, John McCain’s key economic adviser (now ex-key economic advisor), Phil Gramm (one of the five p...

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. Ignorance may deride it. But in the end, there it is.” -- Winston Churchill How would your life change if everything you did and said had 100 percent integrity, was 100 percent the truth and ne...

“There are only two options regarding commitment. You're either in or out. There's no such thing as a life in-between.” -- Pat Riley As sales professionals, we’ve all been there. . . that perfect moment in the business life when we’ve made the ...

No one, no matter how intelligent you are, starts out knowing how to crawl, walk, talk, chew, understand language, read or control our bladders. As we grow, we all learn these things (hopefully) and we all learned them in the same way: one step at a time....

As humans, there are many reasons for conflict, a big one being that we all see the world through different mental models. Mental models are helpful and hurtful and totally necessary. On the helpful side, we use these models to simplify our lives and ma...

"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery If you've been paying attention at all to th...

I've noticed something interesting recently and that is, Americans love to talk. They love to listen to other people talk too (like the television or radio). They get their books on tape. They have the radio tuned to talk shows. . . we're a people unco...

Detailed Criteria 'The devil is in the details.' It's an English idiom I'm sure you've experienced, or at least heard before. This implies that the small things that you weren't expecting or that seemed inconsequential, can sometimes hold up everythi...

"The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity." --Zig Ziglar As a teacher (and a father) it's my fervent hope to impart in my students and children the things in life that are most important which I learned the hard w...