Most questions contain presuppositions. A presupposition is a “fact” that’s embedded in the question, which you will have to accept as true in order to answer the question. For example, if you ask “Why is John always mean to me?”, it assumes John is always mean to you.
Instead of asking “Why do I always screw up?”, how about you ask “How can I most easily do this?”
This question presupposes:
Harness Your Subconscious Wisdom by Asking The Right Questions
- First, step out from behind the podium and choreograph your relationship to the audience.
- Four feet to a foot and a half is personal space, and now we’re paying close attention. In fact, we want to keep our eyes on anyone in that space all the time. Again, it’s a safety issue. That person is close enough to us to do us harm, so we’re going to stay focused. So one of the easiest ways to up the ante on your performance is to warm up the connections between you and your audience by leaving the podium and entering into carefully chosen audience member’s personal space.
- Second, listen to your audience.
- So how do you listen to the audience? The best way is to put regular breaks into your speech — at least every twenty minutes, and preferably every ten — where you stop and take the audience’s temperature. Ask if it has questions, ask for reactions, ask for it to relate its own experience relative to what you’re talking about.
- Finally, focus on your emotional intentions for approximately three minutes before important meetings and speeches.
- How do you focus? Identify the emotion first, and then think of a time when you naturally experienced it. Recall that time as powerfully as you can, invoking each of the five senses, for several minutes just before your speech or meeting. What did the experience taste like? Smell like? Sound like? Feel like? Look like? Run through these sensory cues, put yourself back into the moment, and bring the emotion to life. Then go out and knock ‘em dead
Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.
In 2005, back when music blogs were still a relatively new phenomenon, Hype Machine creator Anthony Volodkin imagined a website that would aggregate those diverse critical voices to answer an age-old question: “What should I listen to?” A 19-year-old college student with an IT side job, Volodkin had little time, little money, and little experience working on the web. But rather than getting discouraged by an incredibly steep learning curve, he took it as a sign that he was onto something.
The Banyan Treehouse: Rockefeller Partners Architects have designed a guesthouse/studio that resembles a treehouse. More photos here.
A heuristic for evaluating any process or infrastructure change in the context of a startup:
Always choose the option that minimizes the total time through the feedback loop.
In other words, any change that accelerates learning is a win, and everything else is waste. This is very different from the trade-offs that need to be made in [corporate] situations where the goal is to optimize for profit, margin, or growth.
So, are great leaders born or made? Let’s look at this one attribute at a time:
- Articulation of the vision—There is no question that some people are much better story tellers than others. However, it is also true that anybody can greatly improve in this area through focus and hard work. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership.
- Alignment of interests—I am not sure if the Bill Campbell Attribute is impossible to learn, but I am pretty sure that it is impossible to teach. Of the three, this one most fits the bill “born not made.”
- Ability to achieve the vision—This attribute can absolutely be made; perhaps this is why Andy Grove’s tolerance for incompetence was legendarily low. Indeed, the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.
In the end, some attributes of leadership can be improved more than others, but every CEO should work on all three.
The Crouches are quadruplets from Connecticut who have ALL been accepted to Yale for college next year. This is the first time the prestigious academic institution has done so. Whether or not the Crouches attend is another matter though, as they still need to find out whether their financial aid is in order. (Via Bobby Hundreds’ Hypebeast Blog)
