You have said it. I have said it. Everyone has said it at some point, “this is just hard,” as if that settles something. As if difficulty is a fixed quality baked into the task itself, the way a rock is heavy or water is wet. Here is the problem: that belief is factually wrong,…
Category: Self-Management
Achievement is a Story, What’s Yours?
As humans, we have a wonderful capability: the ability to tell ourselves stories in the face of reality. However, this great skill often results in our diminishing of accomplishments and exaltation of failures. Our stories tend to overemphasize our positive outcomes or our negative outcomes and are rarely balanced in their content. In this brief…
Imposter Syndrome: It’s in Your Head and Not In Reality (in most cases)
Wikipedia defines imposter syndrome as, “a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.” According to Psychology Today, “Instead of acknowledging their capabilities as well as their efforts, they often attribute their accomplishments to external or transient causes, such as luck,…
Expertise and Deep Domains
I define a deep domain as the knowledge area(s) of highest expertise for the individual. If you think of this area of highest expertise as the top of a pyramid and peripheral areas to that as the next level and peripheral areas to those as the next level and so on, that very small area at the…
You Ate Your Cheese (Redux)
I wrote this blog post in 2013 for another iteration of this site in another time with different challenges than the current challenges we face. I chose to revive it because it applies again now and will always apply. Watch your cheese supply and get a new source of cheese before you eat it all!…