In the current Winter Olympics, Lindsey Vonn was a feel good story about 41 year old ski racer making a remarkable comeback from partial knee replacement surgery and retirement from the sport in 2019. She even won two Downhill events during the 2025-26 ski season prior to the Olympics. But she crashed just 13 seconds into her Olympic downhill run.

Vonn was airlifted off the mountain with a fractured leg, a devastating end to her comeback attempt. But in her Instagram post the next day, she wrote something that captures a fundamental truth about how we should approach both business…
Continue Reading The Courage to Fall

In a recent conversation I had with a longtime friend and client I learned that despite him being in a successful business built through hard work over time, he is restless and wants to make a change, but is scared to do so. I believe that lifetime learning and being open to change is important for all of us. Learning and change are possible at any point in time if you’re willing to take on a new challenge no matter your age, experience level, or how entrenched you are in your current role.

Most professionals spend their careers accumulating expertise…
Continue Reading You’re Never Too Old to Start a New Adventure

Everyone wants to know the secret formula, the one big move that changes everything. But the reality of how success gets built is mundane. Success doesn’t happen because you had one brilliant insight or made one perfect decision. Success happens when you put in small, consistent amounts of effort, every day and every week, regardless of whether you feel motivated or whether anyone’s watching.

This is true whether you’re an attorney, an accountant, a sales person, a financial advisor, filming two minutes of video content for your business, or lifting weights at the gym. You get the idea—small, deliberate, regular…
Continue Reading The Unglamorous Truth About How Success Actually Happens

This isn’t mystical thinking or motivation poster nonsense. It’s how human behavior actually works in practice. Most people think success happens to other people who got luckier breaks or better genetics or more helpful connections. What they’re missing is that your mindset about yourself is the single most powerful predictor of whether you’ll actually accomplish what you set out to do.

When you believe you can succeed at something, that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you believe you can’t, the same thing happens. Your attitude and self-perception are the foundation everything else gets built on.

When you believe you…
Continue Reading Whether You Think You Can or You Think You Can’t, You’re Right

Too many people obsess over their salary, bonus, or job title, or for their business revenue numbers and targets. They’re staring at the scoreboard instead of watching the game being played right in front of them. The football coach Bill Walsh said that “the score takes care of itself” and it’s a fundamental truth about how sustainable success actually works in business and in life.

Walsh understood what most people miss, which is that outcomes are the downstream product of hard work. As you build your business, if you focus in the moment, execution will become your default setting. and…
Continue Reading The Score Takes Care of Itself

Every year, countless professionals reach a fork in the road where they have to decide whether to take on something difficult or play it safe. The ones who consistently choose the hard path are the ones who build careers worth having. I’m not talking about being reckless or taking on every impossible task that comes your way. I’m talking about that moment when a challenge presents itself and your gut tells you it’s going to be difficult, uncomfortable, and risky, but also that it might be exactly what you need to do. That’s when you lean in rather than retreat.
Continue Reading Never Back Down From A Challenge

Look, I get it. January rolls around and suddenly everyone’s a different person (or wants to be). You’re going to connect with all those contacts you always say you will, finally get organized personally and professionally, and go to the gym five days a week – and this time it’s all going to stick. The problem is that by February, maybe March if you’re stubborn, you’re right back where you started, on the same treadmill of life and nothing has really changed. The issue is that a New Year’s resolution and actual sustainable change are two completely different things.

A…
Continue Reading Resolution vs. Reality: Building Change That Actually Sticks

Look, I’ve seen it a so many times. A client sits across from me, eager to close a deal or settle a dispute, convinced that this deal is the only way or is that breakthrough they’ve been chasing. The terms are terrible. The other side is asking for everything and giving nothing. But they’re ready to sign anyway because walking away feels like failure. But walking away from a bad deal isn’t failure, it’s good business sense. No deal is almost always better than a bad deal, and if you don’t internalize this principle, at some point in your career you’re going…
Continue Reading No deal is better than a bad deal

The fastest way to lose credibility is to treat your first thought as your final answer. You’re in a meeting, someone asks a complex question, and your brain immediately serves up a response. It feels right. It sounds confident. And it’s probably wrong. The nightmare isn’t that you had the thought—it’s that you believed it without scrutiny and shared it. Professionals who confuse thinking with knowing make decisions on hunches, give advice based on assumptions, and wonder why things blow up later.

Your initial reaction to a problem is rarely your best analysis. That gut feeling about what a contract…
Continue Reading Don’t believe everything you think

Beginning in 2014, many of you probably read my blog regarding having a checkup for you and, if you have one, your business. This does not involve the doctor, but it does involve all of the other professionals in your personal and business life. Based on the positive feedback, I have made this an annual tradition. I originally made this post the week between Christmas and New Year’s but that’s too late, which is why I now share this a few weeks prior to the end of the year to give you time to take action and look into possible…
Continue Reading The 2025 version of why it’s time for an annual check up for you and your company

Almost nobody hears too many sincere compliments. We’re all walking around with positive thoughts about colleagues, clients, and people in our professional circles, but we keep most of them to ourselves. It’s as if there’s some invisible force field that stops us from just saying what we’re thinking when we appreciate someone.

The solution is simple. Compliment people to their face, and then compliment them behind their back. When you think something nice about someone’s work, their judgment, or just their presence, say it right then. “It’s always fun to see you” or “You handled that situation really well” or…
Continue Reading What We Think But Don’t Say

We’ve all heard countless times that listening is a lost art, an undervalued skill that could transform our businesses and relationships if only we’d slow down and truly hear what others are saying. Management books devote chapters to the practice of being present and attentive. And they’re right to do so—listening matters enormously. But while we’ve been busy diagnosing one side of the communication equation, we’ve completely overlooked its equally essential counterpart, which is candor.

We worry about hurting feelings, damaging relationships, or creating legal exposure. We’ve built entire industries around softening our words, from HR compliance training that teaches…
Continue Reading Candor is the other half of communication that is often forgotten

Confidence is the most valuable currency in business, but most people trade in counterfeit bills. It’s easy to mistake volume for conviction and swagger for certainty, and later watch that same person crater when the pressure actually arrives. Real confidence isn’t about never showing weakness. It’s about knowing your value so thoroughly that you don’t need to perform it every minute of every meeting or day.

People with confidence show themselves in how someone handles status. I’m talking about people who can laugh when they’re the punchline, who can take a younger co-worker’s criticism of their strategy without getting defensive,…
Continue Reading The Currency of Confidence in Real Leaders