Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.

What’s particularly insidious about rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eight month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby’s born. What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.

I’m keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what is important first.

If you’re doing something that requires a lot of attention, stop doing it thirty minutes before it’s time to leave. You can go as much as fifteen minutes, but you’re pushing it. Best to stop at thirty. You spend the remaining 15-30 minutes conducting your daily review, processing your inbox, or completing some of your nagging to do’s.

The enemy is a very good teacher.

100 great speeches—both audio and transcripts—at American Rhetoric as found through lifehack.org. Great stuff at both places.

Here’s a quick and easy way to increase your creativity: once a week go to the book store or magazine stand and skim through a magazine or book on a topic that you are unfamiliar with. Read the table of contents. Read the quotes at the beginning of each section. Just exposing yourself to these new concepts will open you to new ideas.

In all my research on how to overcome procrastination, the biggest suggestion is this: Do the work, get a reward. And it hasn’t worked for me. Just hasn’t. Why should I delay gratification? I’m an adult. I can go out and get whatever “reward” I want whether I’ve completed the work or not.

Slowly, though, something over the past couple of weeks changed. I don’t remember exactly when the switch flipped, but here’s what happened: I stopped thinking of the reward as a “reward”. It’s not the rigid: “Do the work, get the reward.” Rather, it has become: Complete step 1, proceed to step 2, and you just can’t proceed to step 2 until step 1 is complete.

Looking at it this way, “work” before “reward” becomes the natural order of things and that the reward is not a reward without the work—and the work is not complete without the reward.

Yeah, sounds a bit hokey to me, too. It works for me, though. And I just have to go with what works…

It is one thing to study war and another to live a warrior’s life.

I was reminded of this saying at a recent Time Management seminar I attended. I’ve been digesting this phrase for the past few days, and something finally clicked for me: Teachers are always teaching their lessons, though we are not always ready or willing to learn. So, it’s not that the teacher magically appears when you are ready to learn, it’s that you finally see the teacher and the lesson when you are ready to learn.

Now, how do you work at seeing the teachers? Well, Mike, the teacher of the Time Management seminar, had a superb suggestion: write down what it is you want to learn and put it on your calendar (or anywhere you would see it at least once a day) for one month; seeing what you want to learn every day virtually guaranteesthat you’ll start looking for those lessons.

The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Just attended a great Skype seminar with Johnnie Moore on Facilitation for Surprise.

Johnnie had some great insights. The most important—and the key to effective facilitation: be flexible, be equal.

Now, it seems to me, that if you are giving a presentation—as I often do—the only way you can be flexible is if you thoroughly know your topic—knowing the topic empowers you to adapt to technical glitches and to better engage the audience.

That’s not to say that you need to have all the answers. In fact, I think you establish stronger rapport and trust if you admit that you don’t know what you don’t know. What it does mean, though, is that you need to know the presentation good enough so that you can engage in a meaningful conversation, not a scripted “act”.

And when you’ve got the presentation down cold, you can comfortably engage the participants as an equal, not as “the expert”, which means that everyone will get a lot more value out of the meeting.

He covered a lot more in the seminar—I’m only scratching the surface. There’s a couple more of his seminars coming up, and I would strongly recommend you attend.