In a recent post about weight loss and emotions , I referenced a piece of information about the Rider and the Elephant that I gleaned from this book. The ironic part is that when I got to think about it, I realized I never finished the book! I'm a slow reader, so the library needed the book back before I could finish it. (And, side thought, with the Nintendo Switch releasing this coming Friday, is there not a more appropriate time to review this book??) The Rider and Elephant metaphor is introduced early on in the book, so I wanted to take a dive back into Switch. Why? The full title of the book is Switch: How to Change When Change Is Hard , and I was interested in seeing other principles of change the Heath brothers had to offer as potential fodder for future posts. So, now that I've made my way through the full book, did I garner a lot of new information, or was the Rider / Elephant metaphor the only good thing in here? Let's get into it.

A little while back, I wrote a post on weight loss on emotions where I shared that the most important thing when beginning a weight loss journey is managing your emotions. If you haven't read that post, please do as this post will largely build upon that and make much more sense. Diet is a huge deal when losing weight. People might think it's all about exercising, and while exercise is certainly a factor, I would say it has more like a 25% importance. That means that diet holds like a 75% importance. You can workout all day, but if you don't change your diet, I highly, highly doubt you will see much progress at all. Oh, and get rid of the idea of temporary diets. There's a reason I choose the words "dieting lifestyle change." If you truly want to shed the weight and keep it off, there's no going back. You're going to have to make conscious effort to constantly keep a healthy diet. Is it hard? Yes, but I think you'll find it's not too bad o...

Hey there folks. You know that I manage another blog, Engedi Artistry, and when I conceived this post, I couldn't decide whether or not I wanted it here or on that blog. I ended up putting it over there, but I still think it's a great post for the Adulting 101 series. Instead of duplicating the post over here, I'm doing something kind of lazy and just linking this post to that one. I know, I know, this is uncharacteristic of me, but I need a break! Hope you all have a great weekend. LINK: What's in My Work Backpack

"I can't wait to retire someday." That phrase has never sat well with me. Now, I'm not a numbers guy, but I think in this case, numbers make a big impact. The life expectancy of the average person is 80 years old. If we assume that the average person enters the full time workforce at age 22 (when people typically exit undergrad) and retires at age 62 (according to an online source), then that's precisely 40 years of full time work. Roughly half a person's life.

Last week, I challenged you all to meet with at least one new person a week to build your personal network. As somebody who attempts to practice what they preach, I have been undergoing this challenge myself, and I have setup several meetings within my place of work to learn more about the company as well as glean information for the team I'm working with. So far, it's gone pretty well. People have been very gracious and generous with their time and have been more than willing to meet with me. Everything was chugging along great until I got an undesired response... I was being deflected onto somebody else.

On the February 20, 2017 episode of The Adam Carolla Show , host Adam Carolla sat down with Scott Keneally to discuss his new documentary,  Rise of the Sufferfests , and one of the primary focuses of the documentary is the analysis of tough mudder competitions. I only recently heard about these things from a friend, so for those of you not aware, a tough mudder competition is a sort of obstacle course where people subject themselves to a long, arduous sort of trek through mud. Definitely doesn't sound like they're for the light of heart.

Think about all the things you pray for and all the ways in which you've been told to pray. Of course, there's the Lord's Prayer. There's also the ACTS acronym of Adoration-Confession-Thanksgiving-Supplication. And for you early 2000s church folk, how could we ever forget the prayer of Jabez?? Oh yeah, those nostalgia juices are flowing now! There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these prayers. In fact, I use the free Echo app to remind me every two hours to pray using the ACTS acronym. But as good as those prayer models are, there is something rarely called out. Something mentioned in the Bible over and over, yet we hardly ever make an explicit note of it.

In the afterword of Laszlo Bock's Work Rules! , Bock talks about the choice for Google's HR department to be called "People Operations" instead of the traditional "Human Resources". He explained that the choice was deliberate. The thought was that "Human Resources" had a very business-like feel about it, and people had a much fonder respect for teams with "Operations" in the title. I rolled my eyes when I read that, and for those of you paying attention , that subtle physical reaction got me thinking about this. Why is it that I instantly rolled my eyes when I thought about that? The answer came to me quickly: I am personally not a fan of flowery titles. Like when somebody calls themselves something bogus an "idea engineer". What's my issue with this?

If you've read the other book reviews on this blog, you know that I specifically focus on business-related books. I'm not particularly a big fan of fiction nor of nonfiction that isn't of that business field. I really don't know what made me check out Shoe Dog. I suppose it's because I saw its overwhelming popularity on Amazon. Even so, I had no idea it was an autobiography. No idea it was about Nike. And no idea how much I would love reading this book.

We all have people we look up to that influence our actions and behavior on a daily basis. We buy their books the second they hit store shelves. We regularly download their podcasts. We watch their YouTube videos as soon as they are uploaded. For me, those folks include Seth Godin, Ramit Sethi, Adam Carolla, and Tim Ferriss. Speaking of Ferriss, we all know he regularly interviews people at the top of the industry, and one of those interviews with none other than Sophia Amoruso. For those of you unfamiliar with Amoruso, she is the founder and creative genius behind the clothing company Nasty Gal. She's also the author of the New York Times bestseller #GIRLBOSS . (An excellent read, by the way.) One of the questions Ferriss posed to Amoruso was what Amoruso thinks about when she hears the word "successful". This was her response (taken from Ferriss' book  Tools of Titans ):

I was recently listening an interview with Larry McReynolds, former NASCAR crew chief, who talked about the shift in NASCAR sponsorship from Sprint/Nextel to Monster Energy. Call me what you will, but I couldn't help but chuckle to myself because I cannot think of a more appropriate sponsor than energy. Here is a crowd that gets a kick out of watching cars drive in a circle, and Monster only ratchets up that energy to an exponential level. If it sounds like I'm making fun of them, that's not really the case. In all actuality, I am not-so-secretly jealous of them. I wish I could get a thrill off these simple pleasures, but I don't. I wish I could understand and relate with the excitement over watching NASCAR. Moreover, I could say the same thing about any sport. I'm not into the NFL, NBA, NHL, Olympics, or any other sporting event. Actually... maybe having a low threshold for gratification doesn't sound so bad!

A friend was telling me recently about a time when he applied for a senior-level position within his current role. While I think he would have been a great fit for the role, he wasn't given an opportunity to even interview for the position. When asking why his consideration was denied, it was purported that somebody in upper management contended that nobody knew who he was. I'm not a fan of that philosophy because what that person was saying is "We're not going to evaluate the merits of this candidate because we don't personally know him." Isn't that the whole purpose of interviewing...? Anyway, it brings to light a reality that pretty much everybody faces within organization: the importance of networking and relationship building. Doing good work sometimes just isn't enough. Sometimes, it is indeed about who you know.

I was recently approached by a friend to consider my weaknesses, and my first gut reaction in my mind was "I have no weaknesses." Recognizing that that was a proud, not-so-humble thought, I've spent the past couple weeks thinking over areas where I could generally improve myself. And yes, there are indeed some areas I can improve, including... I still tend to consider myself a generally socially awkward individual, especially when meeting new people. When I'm the focal point of attention in conversation, I have the tendency to try to not leave dead air, which sometimes leads me down a path of saying something I probably shouldn't have said. I have the attention span of a squirrel. This list is something I am constantly working to improve upon. But there was one thing I mentally noted down that I still cannot decide is a strength or a weakness. Because of this indecision, I purposefully have not acted toward "fixing" it.

A few months back, I wrote a review of How Google Works  by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. That book covered many generalized topics about, well, how Google works. My review of that book was lukewarm, and that was partially because it seemed as if some of the things Google does can't be replicated in other organizations. Enter Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead  by Laszlo Bock, now-former head of People Operations at Google. Where the formerly mentioned book had more of a general focus, Work Rules! focuses on the human resource side of Google, spanning topics ranging from recruiting to performance reviews. So, how does this book compare to How Google Works ? Does its narrower focus help or hinder its content? More importantly, does the content of this book hold weight in companies that aren't Google? Maybe even in your own company? We'll explore all these questions and more in the review below.

January 2015 marked the beginning of an entire renovation of myself. That was when I started my Masters program, got the wheels turning on several certifications, and, of course, when I began to lose weight. If you were to ask me which of those was the most difficult, it was losing weight. Hands down, it was losing weight.  I'm not saying the other things were necessarily easy, but there was one major difference between my weight loss and the academic-like things: the emotional connection. Where there were some emotions tied to getting things like my PMP, there was a huge emotional connection to my weight. I gained weight because I feel good when I eat. I wouldn't even say that I was eating to compensate for something else, like occurs within some people. No, I just plain liked eating. A lot.

When you read the title of this post, what direction are you expecting me to go in? That a good memory helps you out in processing knowledge gained in meetings? Or that remembering information from reading documentation helps in making informed decisions?

I've been thinking a lot about my faith lately. Mostly because if I want to reintroduce (or newly introduce) this faith to you all, I want to be able to clearly articulate why I think the Christian faith is important. And because you are intelligent people, I'm not settling for the typical answers likes...

Regardless of what industry you work in, your role in the organization, or size of the organization, you're eventually going to have to figure something out that you aren't currently privy to. Heck, this can even apply outside of work. It could be trying to figure out the business process of another area in your company to trying to file your taxes without the help of a third party. This isn't just a "This might happen someday" kind of thing. No, it WILL happen. You're going to have to figure out some ambiguous process or pioneer something that has never been done before. I've found it to be a very valuable skill in my work, so here are five tips to help you figure stuff out.

My health habits toward the end of the 2016 calendar year were pretty horrible. In November and December, I was working out twice a day: once before work (for an hour) and once after work (for 90 minutes). That's a crazy two and a half hours per day. Want to know how much weight I lost in that time?