Manage Your Journey

You don’t need us to tell you that life is complicated. It’s a constant push-pull between the things you want, the things you need, and the things you get. It’s easy to get lost along the way. To reclaim agency and optimism, designer Ayse Birsel applied design techniques to the grand project of building a life—and it worked. Here she shares the first part of her method: deconstruction.

Ultimately design—like life—is about choices. After all the exploration and research, all the experimentation and iteration, you need to decide what elements will and won’t be part of the final product. So in the “reconstruction” phase of her process for designing the life you love, Ayse Birsel offers exercises that constrain your options, forcing you to think carefully about what you want most in your life and why. Having done the “deconstruction” exercises, you’ll have a clear sense of...

You don’t have to be wealthy to gain financial freedom. You don’t have to have a supercomputer or an exclusive money manager. In talking to 50 of the world’s most financially successful people, Tony Robbins learned that people make two common mistakes in managing their money: not investing it, and investing it with mutual funds that underperform and skim off the top. Avoid these two traps, and you can turn even a modest income into significant wealth.

How can you tell if you’re happy at work is the same way as telling if you’re happy in any human relationship. We have relationships with our organizations, with our jobs, as we have relationships with any tribe. If you’re a member of a club where you have unbelievable love and loyalty for the people in that club, that church, then you go do it more and you give lots of energy and time to it. Well, it’s the same thing. Do you wake up excited to get dressed and go to work? Do you dread Monday...

The volatility of today’s job market is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, change can be scary and painful. On the other hand, nothing lights up the human brain like a new learning challenge. A volatile world necessitates “second-skilling”, the deep pursuit of at least one major skill beyond what your current work demands. This necessity can unlock your full potential in ways unimaginable to the previous generation.

We know that our brains are imperfect decision-making tools. One of the most common cognitive biases, status quo bias, is essential to understand for anyone at the poker table or in business of any kind.

In general, “be prepared” isn’t bad advice. The trouble is that no bell rings when you’re prepared enough. As a result, it’s easy to become mired in the quicksand of research, editing, and consensus-gathering to the point where opportunity passes you by. Tending generally to be more socially aware and methodical than their male counterparts, women are especially vulnerable to this pitfall. The solution? Less preparation, more action.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to change old habits and improve performance is to attempt total, instant self-transformation. New Year’s resolutions are the perfect example. People vow to lose 100 pounds, to “finish that novel”, etc. without breaking these monumental goals down into the incremental actions that might make them achievable. As a result (studies have shown), the vast majority of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned. As an alternative, Amy Cuddy recommends “...

You’ve heard the old line about how the impression you make in the first ten seconds of a job interview determines whether or not you’ll get the job. This may or may not always be the case, but the fact is that hiring isn’t an entirely rational process. Interviewers’ impressions of you are often shaped by unconscious factors that may have nothing to do with your suitability for the job. You can use this fact to your advantage.

The word “creative” is sometimes waved around like a badge of honor. We speak of creativity in hushed tones, as the special province of the “talented”. In reality, the creative process is messy, open, and vulnerable. It’s about listening to subtle unconscious impulses rather than birthing brilliant ideas, fully formed.

Brainstorming. At this point, even the most staid, old-fashioned, conservative companies in the world understand its value. It helps companies innovate! It taps into the creative power of collaboration! But very few know how to brainstorm effectively, and what do with all those ideas afterward. Brainstorming sessions, often lead to a cellphone snapshot of the whiteboard. This, says Bill Burnett, is “where good ideas go to die.” But with a few simple guidelines, brainstorming can become a power...

When you’re studying a group of people, trying to understand what makes them tick when it comes to the kinds of problems your company can solve, it’s helpful to have a framework to guide your observations. The AEIOU method, a favorite of designers and anthropologists, breaks down the key areas you need to pay the closest attention to: activities, environments, interactions, objects, and users.

Kenji Yoshino’s research reveals that even best-in-class organizations have a significant gap between what respondents said their inclusion values were and what respondents experienced their inclusion values as being. In this lesson, explore Kenji Yoshino’s strategies for making sure your organization goes beyond lip service to actually living up to stated values.

Reid Hoffman may just be the guru of professional networking. Reid is the co-founder of LinkedIn, the web’s largest business-oriented social networking service. LinkedIn serves more than 259 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.Hoffman argues that your network is your career. Instead of focusing on a checklist of titles and skills that will get you your next job, he says you should invest your time in building relationships.The key is to think about how you can col...

“Bottling” and “brooding” are two common and often unhelpful ways that we tend to deal with difficult emotions—either pushing them away in order to stay focused on the situation at hand or dwelling on how we feel in an obsessive attempt to get to the bottom of it. There’s some research showing that these tendencies break down along gender lines, with bottling being a more typically masculine behavior and brooding more typically feminine, but both strategies can result in diminished cogniti...