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We have a moral obligation to develop ourselves. That’s what this entire column, found in each issue of Uncommon Sense, is all about – developing ourselves in myriad ways, be it physically, intellectually, financially, spiritually, socially, or in other ways. One of the reasons it is a moral imperative to develop ourselves is because by […]

Leo Long was something of a phenomenon. After attaining All American honors on the Track & Field team at Stanford University in the Javelin, he started coaching at Los Altos High School in Northern California, where he built a Track & Field dynasty, winning the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League (SCVAL) championships every single year […]

I was preparing for some traveling recently. I was going to take a road trip but I wanted to find a gym to go to so I wouldn’t miss my workout routines. I Google-searched the gyms located in the area where I would be and called the first one, which happened to be a Planet […]

I don’t compete with others as a general rule. Instead, I compete against myself. As a young sales professional early in my career, I was given a sales quota of $600,000 for the year. Knowing the nature of the sales realities I was dealing with allowed for the possibility of closing business every week (as […]

All of us, from time to time, get into a sort of funk. We lose our focus. We get “writer’s block.” We get lethargic. We lose our momentum. I know an easy way to stay productive. When you have a list of tasks that need to get accomplished, you undoubtedly write them down somewhere. Some […]

When I was very young, a man would come around the neighborhood with a grindstone on his back ringing a large bell. He would settle on a corner and sharpen knives and scissors for five cents each. Women, of course, were home, and would send their kids down to provide the man with their blades […]

I was speaking to a group of college students this week, and during part of my presentation, I did a Q&A. Lots of questions were coming my way, and all them were more or less thoughtful and intelligent questions. But my favorite question was this: “Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give […]

Recently I was the opening speaker at a conference. I was to be followed by another speaker who would close out the conference. Happily, I was prepared. I had crafted a powerful message, had rehearsed it carefully, and when it came time to deliver it, I did so in a compelling manner. It was a […]

Most of us squander the most precious resource we have – our time. A lot of this is due to poor planning. Sometimes it is due to a lack of clarity around our sense of purpose. And both of those remain our own responsibility. Let’s start with the second one. Our life, our very existence, […]

There are forces all around us that pull us into the vortex of mediocrity and slothfulness. I call this tendency The Boiled Frog Syndrome. Most of you have heard about this metaphor. The short version is that if a healthy frog is dropped in a pot of boiling water, that frog with take immediate, decisive […]