Live with Purpose

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Tag: intentional living

The Emigrant Mindset

July 28, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Recently I was listening to a podcast (episode 157 of the EntreLeadership Podcast, to be exact).  In it, host Ken Coleman (the best interviewer around, in my estimation) was interviewing Brian Buffini, an Irish emigrant and entrepreneur.  Buffini was relating an observation of his, that emigrants to America who went from rags to riches shared seven traits.  He went on to say that he believes in these traits so much that he seeks to instill those traits in his own children.  Those traits are:

The willingness to learn
A “do whatever it takes” mindset
The willingness to outwork others
A Spirit of gratitude
The boldness to invest
The willingness to delay gratification
Remembering where they came from

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The Stairs Are Never Crowded

April 29, 2016 / / 0 Comments

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken

 

I work on the seventh floor of an eight-story office building that houses several hundred team members, maybe over a thousand.  Around the start and end of the work day, the area in front of our four elevators is, as you might imagine, fairly crowded.  Occasionally out of impatience (and honestly my internal aversion to crowds) I’ll take the stairs.  And especially lately, in a move toward being more fit, I’ve begun using the stairs several times a day.

There’s something noteworthy I have observed in those trips: the stairs are never crowded.

And self-improvement in general is very much the same way.  The path to growing ourselves and being intentional with priorities and choices is never crowded. Continue reading

Do You Have Enough Margin to Finish?

April 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

While driving recently, I saw a sign in front of a convenience store.  It was handmade, on poster board, and stapled to a stick.  That much was well-done.  However, the hand-writing was not so well-done.  It read, “We have your chicken supplies here”.  At least, that’s what I think it was supposed to say (I wish I had taken a picture).  You see, as someone was crafting this sign, they ran out of room for writing the word “supplies” and had to cram it on the right margin.

It seems like I’ve seen that a lot in handmade signs – well-meaning but hastily constructed.  The end result is not quite what the author intended.  And don’t we do that frequently in life?  We mean well, and we know what we want to say or do, so we jump right in with little or no forethought.  Things look good, we are making progress, and then we notice we are running out of margin.

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