If you've caught on by now, I try to do at least one of these "Top 5" style posts each week, and I've focused a lot on important things to increase your business life. But equally as important is to ensure you have a good relationship with your significant other. Arguably, this is the most important top 5 I've written so far. Careers will morph and change over time, but, assumingly, you'll be with the same person the rest of your life, even well beyond the end of your career. Plus, this isn't meant to be a chore. It's supposed to be fun!

I browse LinkedIn pretty often, and the category of things that appears most on that main feed are inspirational quotes by inspirational leaders. Folks like Richard Branson and Simon Sinek appear most often. More specifically, the quotes have a central theme to them: companies need to hire good people.  For example, one of the latest quotes I've seen on my feed include this one from Tina Fey: "In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and getting out of their way." That's a great sentiment, but is that really reinforced in reality?

On a recent episode of The Adam Carolla Show , host Adam Carolla asked guest Neil  deGrasse Tyson what really elevated his status to the point where he is today. Tyson shared that his notoriety really began to take off when he began sharing what he deemed to be simple observations in every day life. The specific example he used was the fact that you can buy guns at a Walmart but cannot by a profanity-laced music album. It was observations like these shared on Twitter that sparked wars between other Twitter users and thus caused him to become famous for making such observations. Tyson isn't the only person to note this, too. In almost every interview I've watched with Seth Godin, he responds that his prime occupation in life is observing things and making notes about them. And if my memory serves me correctly, Jerry Seinfeld has attributed a lot of his comedy from observing minute and peculiar life events. So apparently, there's something important about this observati...

One of the books I am currently reading through is Work Rules!  by Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at none other than Google. It's been a pretty good read so far. One concept the book introduced me to was this idea of "aided recall", and it resonates me because it falls right in line with the recent memory studies previous posts have analyzed. After reading through Bock's piece on aided recall, I set down my Kindle and thought to myself, "Why aren't we trying to employ this everywhere?" And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it's not appropriate for everything. Let's break this post down into three sections: defining aided recall, when to use it, and when to avoid it.

For those of you familiar with the Project Management Professional (PMP) designation, you know it's not an easy thing to obtain, so when I share that I earned my PMP, I am usually immediately asked this question: "How did you do it?" It was a long road for me, and I'm proud to have come out better on the other side. So I'm glad to share with you what worked well for me!

You might be surprised to learn that a big influencer in my life has been none other than comedian Adam Carolla. I'm an avid listener of almost all the Carolla Digital podcasts, including the titular Adam Carolla Show. Even though he is a comedian, he shares a lot of personal views that have resonated a lot with me, and I largely attribute my drive to lose weight to his, for lack of better word, teachings.

The idea of thinking of something about something bigger than me always fascinates me, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Literally, I mean that outer space fascinates me, and figuratively, I mean researching philosophical ideas. These two loves are captured pretty well within a couple different movies: Contact , Moon , and Angels and Airwaves' Love to name a few.

While I haven't been very vocal about it (yet) on the blog, I began teaching myself graphic design about a month ago now. Aside from the cost of having Adobe Creative Cloud, I have spent exactly $1 on actually training myself on these tools. Using the internet, I've been able to teach myself such things as creating this low-poly self portrait: It's not perfect, but given that I was able to create that after only having had two weeks of training in Adobe Illustrator, I'm still pretty happy with the results. Aside from graphic design, free (or nearly free) content online has helped me to build skills in project management, agile development, marketing, and much more. But because it's kind of a "Wild West" out there since anybody can post anything out there, I wanted to share some tips that I have found helpful in my endeavors.

I'm going to break off from my usual explanation of whatever trending idea to be open with you all about some stuff. I chose Blogger as the platform for this blog because it's housed under Google, and I find Google to be a trustworthy company. What I did not realize is the extent to which Blogger provides analytics. Obviously, I can't see exactly who is reading this blog, but I can see a number of other things. I can see where traffic is coming from, whether from LinkedIn or Twitter. I can also see how many times people have viewed each post. And I can also tell you that I wrote my first zero-view post recently. Also, to date, there has never been a single comment on any post. I'm not going to share which post that is because viewership is not the purpose of this blog, nor am I looking for anybody to comment now. But I will say that it is a little disheartening. This would normally have been the point where I'd shut down the blog and labeled it a failure. Bu...

Well, that's probably a name you heard in a while! For those of you not familiar with that name, Rob Bell was (and kind of still is?) a big name in the Christian community. He is the former megachurch founder and pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, wrote widely read books Sex God  and Velvet Elvis , and is probably most widely known for his NOOMA video series. In 2011, Rob Bell had a big falling out with the Christian community following the release of his book, Love Wins . In that book, he contended that people would be able to accept Jesus and enter heaven after death in addition to before death, which many people misconstrued as universalism. (Which is not particularly right... but I can see why people would draw that conclusion.) Having attended a Christian school at the time, I was right in the thick of the controversy. People freaked out. Having been looked at as a Christian hero in the community for the longest time, people were floored with the sentiments shared in Love...

In the previous post, we covered a super high level understanding of memory studies and ended that post with the fact that we can take advantage of memory categories so much that we can manipulate our memories to memorize obscure sequences of information (e.g. decks of shuffled cards). So, now that we have covered that, we can move on to why this is important to marketing!

This is a big topic that I feel merits two separate posts for now. I might even revisit this topic again in the future. For now, the first part will cover a very, very high level discussion on memory studies, and the next blog post will cover why these memory studies are critical in thinking through marketing strategies.

Having written two other posts on trust this week, I thought it only appropriate to focus this week's top 5 on tips to build trust amongst your peers. While I am no expert in this area, I have found the five tips shared below to have helped me build camaraderie amongst my teammates over the years. I hope they can help you, too!

Process improvement is a hot topic in almost all major organizations these days. This is evident by the proliferation of process improvement methodologies like Six Sigma, ITIL, and even Scrum to an extent. You can't really blame these organizations for focusing on process improvements. Processes, when done correctly, make things go faster, run more efficiently, and get things done for less money. But there is a scary aspect to processes, too. One that is rapidly changing the business landscape as we know it. First, we need to understand the nature of processes. Sure, we understand that processes make things better, faster, cheaper, but why is that?

"I thought I knew him." "I never would have expected it was her all along." How many of you have said some variation of those phrases above? You may even recall thinking that thought multiple times. For better or worse, our minds categorize things into categories of familiarity. Whenever we see a glass filled with some sort of liquid, we instantly recognize it as some sort of consumable beverage. If that liquid is a translucent amber color, we may recognize that as some sort of apple juice or beer. This is why first impressions are such a big deal. When we meet somebody, our minds form a picture about that person based on their behavior, body language, apparel, and more that is so strong that it takes weeks or even months for that person to re-influence the way we think about them. (Which is why we need to be mindful of the symbols we surround ourselves with.) When it comes to business or life matters in general, there are two high level ideas we need to ke...

The picture above is a collage containing different shots of my desk at home. If you have no idea who I am and were asked to describe my character?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I like to maximize the value of my time since that is one thing money can never buy more of! My favorite phrase around our house lately has been "There just aren't enough hours in the day!" I have found over the years that there are indeed tips to maximize the value of your time! This is how I was able to balance getting a Master's degree, having a full time job, serving in the church, and spending time with my wife all without going insane every single day.