Category: Personal Growth

Phil Holberton

Phil Holberton

Dedicated to helping you achieve your maximum potential

A Long Drive With Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes The pre-eminent business writer still wielding the pen is Jim Collins.  But if you’re a better listener than a reader, and if you have a long drive or a plane flight coming up, check out this 2.5-hour audio interview with Jim Collins on the Farnam Street Website.  This is an enjoyable and

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A Larger Ambition

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes John Henry Newman once remarked that “history offers lessons, not rules.”  Imitating the path of one successful person is tempting because it’s easy, but is rarely the formula for success; we have to learn from many leaders with different stories in order to extract applicable principles as to what leadership really is. Presidential

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A Pocketful of Mentors

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously remarked that  “you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” ( Or, alternatively, as James Michener wrote, “Bad companions bring bad luck”)  The question is: who should these five people be?  One answer, and maybe the best one,  is “mentors.” Clearly, having

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Leader, Scale Thyself

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes The most important person you ever manage is yourself.  Every person’s time talent and energy is finite, so your career advancement involves making choices about your behavior that provide the choices you want. To wit:  Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg offers some advice in a very short article about whether you are

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It’s the Transition, not the Task

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes The most successful among us, in our midst, seems to be universally good at managing themselves.  Perhaps the thing they do the best is managing their relationship with their actions; especially starting and staying the course.  This short HBR posting suggests that our greatest struggle “isn’t actually doing the thing, it’s

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The Passion Trap

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes “Follow your passion”  may be in the top ten entries for career advice.  It may also be the most dangerous. This short article from Forbes, “Why Following Your Passion is Dead”, takes this advice to task as nearly certain to ruin or at least damage lives and careers. The author’s challenge

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Are You Under the Disfluence?

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Fairly or not, life is a first impression business, and as the saying goes we rarely get a second chance to make a first impression. Part of this is how we speak, especially in front of groups and how we rely on  “fillers” or “crutch words” such as “Um, “Ah”, “You know” and many others

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The Care of Our Time

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Benjamin Franklin once challenged a friend,  “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” You’ll love your time more once you realize how much of it you are wasting. Start buying back some of the only resource you can’t buy more of

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Quiet Ones in Charge

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes One trait we don’t normally associate with great leaders is introversion.  Instead, leaders are often chosen for a winning, outgoing personality, which, sadly, sometimes is all that disguises an “empty suit.” Recent research from the Harvard Business Review may give cheer to introverts and a new perspective to those hiring

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IQ, EQ and AQ

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes For decades, the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) was the metric most focused upon in assessing one’s chances for success. In the 1990’s,  the Emotional Intelligence quotient (EQ) took on increasing importance as a predictor of career success. Now comes “AQ”.  A short Wired Magazine article provides a good overview of how AQ along

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Set the Tone for a Successful Career

Don't let your title dictate your strategy. Rather, use these 7 steps for a smooth transition and to succeed in the most important period of your employment: your first 90 days.

As a new manager or leader, you have your work cut out for you but it's important to slow down and be strategic. Many careers get sidetracked during the first 90 to 180 days because the entry was too fast. Follow the advice in this free white paper to set the tone during your onboarding and to set yourself up for success.

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