Your col­lege admis­sion let­ter or essay is one of the most impor­tant doc­u­ments you will ever write. I want to show you how to write your­self to the head of the pack. To do that I need to first explain to you the con­cept of Stump Speeches, which are often used by politi­cians. Regard­less of the […]

There may be two main func­tions of an edu­ca­tional sys­tem. One is about hav­ing a cer­tain set of skills: the abil­ity to mul­ti­ply or list uses for a paper clip. The other func­tion is about devel­op­ing mem­bers of a soci­ety, teach­ing peo­ple how to get on and inter­act with each other. This way peo­ple know how […]

Dan Pink is a mas­ter of cre­ative swip­ing, which is MBA-speak for “he steals other peo­ples’ ideas.” Which isn’t to say he’s not a clever chap. And we cer­tainly guys like him, crafty writ­ers who aren’t put off by research, who weave the lat­est ideas into pithy, punchy, com­pelling nar­ra­tives. Cer­tainly, for every artic­u­late Dan […]

The new prob­lems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our inge­nu­ity and our care­ful, cre­ative con­sid­er­a­tion. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get mean­ing­fully involved. Why is this? I think there is a col­lec­tive feel­ing that these prob­lems are too big for any of us to make […]

Llloyd Jones (who tragically/hilariously failed to grad­u­ate uni­ver­sity because of library fines) once said that ‘’the men who try to do some­thing and fail are infi­nitely bet­ter than those who try to do noth­ing and suc­ceed.’’ We’ve all heard a lot of quotes like this grow­ing up (though rarely from peo­ple who failed to graduate […]

Today’s grad­u­ates face a new breed of chal­lenges as they enter the work­force. They will con­front messier, intractable prob­lems such as cli­mate change, global ter­ror­ism, antibi­otic resis­tant dis­eases and per­sis­tent mar­ket weak­ness. The same tech­nolo­gies that empow­ered them as learn­ers at the same time also mul­ti­plied the poten­tial for global havoc. And this has changed the definition […]

You will likely make a mil­lion dol­lars. The aver­age Amer­i­can earns between $1 mil­lion and $2 mil­lion dol­lars in their life­time. But that’s not what I’m talk­ing about. This arti­cle will tell you how to end up with $1 mil­lion dol­lars in your bank account. (And, as you’re about to see, you’re going to need it.) $1 […]

As I kid I loved Snakes and Lad­ders. I don’t even know if you can find that board game any­where any­more, but I enjoyed it. (Okay, I just found it on Ebay for $2). It was pretty sim­ple. Basi­cally you roll the dice to see how many spaces you can move for­ward. The first person […]

Randy Komisar is a good guy. He’s a Sil­i­con Val­ley CEO. Lis­ten­ing to him speak is like being sat down by your down-to-earth uncle, who wants to give you career advice. Komisar is good at giv­ing inter­est­ing advice about ‘fol­low­ing your pas­sion’ with­out sound­ing trite or overly moti­va­tional.  A lot of us get stuck on […]

Seth (the Mac­Daddy of Mar­ket­ing) Godin has gath­ered ideas from 60 bril­liant peo­ple, each shar­ing their insights into what mat­ters at the begin­ning of 2010. Frankly, if you flip through this slide show and don’t feel at least a tin­gle of inspi­ra­tion, you’re read­ing the wrong blog. I can’t choose which ideas I’d most rec­om­mend. There is […]