is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity. This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendab... posted on Jul 7 2013 (39,724 reads)

making your usual, to-do list of tasks for the day, try making a second private list of what it is that you really want in life each day. Discover what you really feel passionate about and make that an essential focus and energy source in your life. Doing so means that passionate endeavors will become a source of personal pride, which will help guarantee that your life will never be “meaningless” to you when you look back on it in the future, as too many economically successful business people have sadly reported. 4. Transform shyness into social engagement. Practice becoming the socially engaging host at life’s parties instead of resigning yourself to be its per... posted on Jul 25 2013 (120,701 reads)

what matters most. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says, "I keep things focused. The speech I give every day is: 'This is what we do. Is what we are doing consistent with that, and can it change the world?'" Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com, has this piece of advice: "Pick one thing and do that one thing—and only that one thing—better than anyone else ever could." We can derive a great deal of power from developing a laser focus on our top business priorities. It's one of the attributes that sets apart the average businessperson from the more successful one. 2. Ruthlessly block out distractions. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova ... posted on Aug 12 2013 (154,412 reads)

president of Pacifica Graduate Institute, has written, “Avoiding our relationship with nature only hastens the inevitable: the death of the natural world.” One way to acknowledge our love for nature, grieve for its destruction, and kindle compassion is through ritual. Ritual can help us recognize beauty in people and in our surroundings and inspire one another to develop creative responses to heal ourselves and our world. A Path toward Change In October 2000, shoppers and business people in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, were startled when the wail of bagpipes suddenly filled the air. Men and women wearing black began to file silently down the street toward the st... posted on Aug 26 2013 (16,918 reads)

the grammar of social media to help people share some of the essential resources of modern life: cars, skills, rides, experiences, housing, money, work, workspace, clothes, books, and more. At the same time, the rapid adoption of smartphones turned sharing into a real-time, on-the-go, place-based experience. The Internet, instead of becoming a separate utopia, was unlocking the potential of individuals and idle physical assets in offline communities. Network technologies, shared access business models, and dirt cheap production gear are giving individuals the same productive power and market access that only big corporations could command just a few years ago. In the midst of crisis... posted on Sep 4 2013 (18,264 reads)

first little book for not very much money, I then decided I might be able to do that for a living — and got 900 rejection letters in a row. And then for the next seven to 10 years, my company was basically on the verge of bankruptcy the whole time. There were, you know, really dramatic stuff like when the vice president of AOL threatened to have me arrested if I came to her office to apologize for something we had screwed up. Or having to fire our biggest client who was two-thirds of our business just because they were jerks. And we decided that we didn't want to work with jerks and become the kind of company that was good at working with jerks. But what they all had in common,... posted on Sep 27 2013 (29,489 reads)

Business Simplicity: Simplicity means that a new kind of economy is growing in the world, with healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds (home-building materials, energy systems, food pro­duction, transportation). As the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is being com­bined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces, and transportation systems of developed nations, it is generating an enormous wave of green business innovation and employment. 7. Civic Simplicity: Simplicity means that living more lightly and sustainably on the Earth requires changes in every area of public life — from publi... posted on Oct 22 2013 (54,857 reads)

level, while good, is just not enough. Change on the scale required by the severity of today's planetary and social crises requires a broader vision and a plan for addressing the root causes of the problem. To do that we must stop thinking of ourselves primarily as consumers and start thinking and acting like citizens. That's because the most important decisions about stuff are not those made in the supermarket or department store aisles. They are made in the halls of government and business, where decisions are made about what to make, what materials to use, and what standards to uphold. Consumerism, even when it tries to embrace "sustainable" products, is a set of ... posted on Sep 28 2013 (31,837 reads)

local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper "prices of progress", or made the business of folklorists. Nevertheless, local culture has a value, and part of its value is economic. This can be demonstrated readily enough.  For example, when a community loses its memory, i... posted on Mar 4 2014 (22,394 reads)

with the network pattern. When you look at the network of an ecosystem, at all these feedback loops, another way of seeing it, of course, is as recycling. Energy and matter are passed along in cyclical flows. The cyclical flows of energy and matter — that’s another principle of ecology. In fact, you can define an ecosystem as a community where there is no waste. Of course, this is an extremely important lesson we must learn from nature. This is what I focus on when I talk to business people about introducing ecoliteracy into business. Our businesses are now designed in a linear way — to consume resources, produce goods, and throw them away. We need to redesign our b... posted on Feb 26 2014 (27,482 reads)

movement to return to their faith's spiritual and ethical roots. Their leader was an obscure farmer's son who has been described by one historian as "the noblest exemplar of simple living ever produced in America." His name? John Woolman. Woolman is now largely forgotten, but in his own time he was a powerful force who did far more than wear plain, undyed clothes. After setting himself up as a cloth merchant in 1743 to gain a subsistence living, he soon had a dilemma: his business was much too successful. He felt he was making too much money at other people's expense. In a move not likely to be recommended at Harvard Business School, he decided to reduce his pro... posted on Mar 14 2014 (43,740 reads)

the planet, new technologies and business models are decentralizing power and placing it in the hands of communities and individuals.  "We are seeing technology-driven networks replacing bureacratically-driven hierarchies," says VC and futurist Fred Wilson, speaking on what to expect in the next ten years. View the entire 25-minute video below (it's worth it!) and then check out the 21 innovations below. Here are 21 innovations that will help make it happen: 1. Open Garden Decentralized technology will become mainstream in 2014, according to the Open Garden Foundation, a San Francisco-based startup ded... posted on Apr 7 2014 (184,196 reads)

received there. Roughly 600 people have completed the quiz so far (which is one-third the number of people who usually complete our quizzes by this point in its lifespan—an interesting finding in and of itself). About thirty percent said they were from outside of the United States; the rest were scattered across the U.S., with the biggest representation in the West Coast and Midwest. Also, though the respondents hailed from diverse organizations, nearly half worked in a for-profit business office. Here’s what we learned about how Greater Good readers see and experience gratitude in their organizations. The type of organization predicted how much gratitude people per... posted on Mar 31 2014 (17,701 reads)

so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making better decisions on a daily basis. Almost every habit that you have — good or bad — is the result of many small decisions over time. And yet, how easily we forget this when we want to make a change. So often we convince ourselves that change is only meaningful if there is some large, visible outcome associated with it. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, traveling the world or any other goal, we often put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. Meanwhile, improving by just 1 percent i... posted on Apr 4 2014 (82,276 reads)

you wasted less time and got more done? Welcome to the club. So why is it, then, when we mean well and are focused on the task at hand, we can still manage to get bogged down by things like emails and weekly reports? The key to being productive is knowing your priorities, notes Robert Pozen, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School. He's also the former president of Fidelity and executive chairman of MFS Investment Management, author of "Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours," and teaches courses on maximizing personal productivity. Being "productive means getting a lot done relative... posted on Jun 11 2014 (50,391 reads)

Business Simplicity: Simplicity means that a new kind of economy is growing in the world, with healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds (home-building materials, energy systems, food pro­duction, transportation). As the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is being com­bined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces, and transportation systems of developed nations, it is generating an enormous wave of green business innovation and employment. 7. Civic Simplicity: Simplicity means that living more lightly and sustainably on the Earth requires changes in every area of public life — from public tra... posted on Apr 29 2014 (19,757 reads)

sure what to do if my food ran out. I canceled two scheduled dinners, knowing they were way beyond my budget.” Then there is the popular TV show, Undercover Boss, which inconspicuously plants senior executives in entry-level positions within their own companies to gain a firsthand perspective on how they function from the bottom up. Stripped of cufflinks and chauffeurs, the “worker-bosses” peer behind the curtain of the c-suite into the dirty underbelly of their business. They emerge endowed with a unique purview to effectively evolve and grow their companies. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the stocks of all the public companies that have appeared on th... posted on Jun 18 2014 (19,805 reads)

really easy to avoid doing the work at all. The only way to be consistent enough to make a masterpiece is to give yourself permission to create junk along the way. The Schedule is the System During a conversation about writing, my friend Sarah Peck looked at me and said, “A lot of people never get around to writing because they are always wondering when they are going to write next.” You could say the same thing about working out, starting a business, creating art, and building most habits. The schedule is the system that makes your goals a reality. If you don’t set a schedule for yourself, then your only option is to rely on motiva... posted on Oct 13 2014 (22,120 reads)

researchers found that those participants who experienced a relationship threat and then watched their favorite TV show were actually buffered against the blow to self-esteem, negative mood, and feelings of rejection. It pays to have friends on TV. 5. Watching blurs the lines between self and other, merging the watcher and the watched. From micro video security cameras (“less than one inch square”) to The Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, watching is now someone’s business plan. Eyeball-hungry producers especially want to blur the boundaries between the game of reality TV and the illusion of living real lives. The result: Watch culture alters not only our se... posted on Sep 11 2014 (34,007 reads)

the moment has come that someone else seems to need the word more, they pass the key forward. And then they go back to The Giving Keys site and tell their story. ©The Giving Keys The Giving Keys began receiving stories from people who’d given keys and people who’d received keys. Keys have circulated through all different walks of life from people in chemotherapy wards fighting cancer to college students setting out on their own for the first time. But the business, which began out of complete happenstance, has evolved into something bigger than its founder could have ever even imagined. L.A.-based singer-songwriter and actress Caitlin Crosby grew up... posted on Nov 30 2014 (19,537 reads)