It was my good fortune for several years to attend a little rural high school in New Brunswick. Happy times with good friends, exceptional teachers, and a principal of enormous foresight. Grade Eleven was an important enough year, focused on preparation for the Provincial Examinations. For those of us academically inclined, the “Provincials” carried enormous…
Hiking boots are funny things– correctly chosen and broken in, they allow you effortlessly to hike for miles and miles and climb the roughest terrain. But just try to hike in ill-fitting or stiff boots right out of the box, and you’ll soon be whimpering your way back to your starting point. Our careers are…
Of all human interaction, perhaps nothing is more volatile and dangerous than scorn. Scorn is a wildfire which will as quickly burn down the house of the scorner as the scorned. Scorn may be the spoken word, but it is just as often a silence when there should have been a word of support or…
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While it’s doubtful you can ever know too much about your subject matter, there is such a thing as the “can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome: you focus so much on “knowing” that you lose sight of “doing” and ultimately fail as a professional. My recollection of my law school classmates is that…
What has this got to do with your profession or business? Everything, actually. With few exceptions, you only get business if people know about you and your offerings. Almost invariably, the best way to have people know about you and your offerings is by word of mouth. So, if you want to get the best…
Amongst journalists, “burying the lede’ is an idiom meaning that you place the really important (but often inconvenient) news far down in the article. For example, if you don’t like a particular political candidate, you might write first about the size of her crowd, then the fact that the sound system went down, and further…
All the self-help books and inspirational speakers tell you to confront the face in the mirror– to be honest with yourself. As nice and helpful as this insight may be, it overlooks one obvious and essential truth: the face you see in the mirror is not the face that others see. You see yourself in…
You know the old adage about trying to put a square peg in a round hole. But most of us are trying to do something even more frustrating: trying to make a peg fit a hole when we’re not sure of the the shape of either. Imagine a bag full of pegs of nearly the…
Larry Roine was a force of nature, born to practice law, and one of the most successful negotiators I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Larry’s favourite and best saying was, “Never take the last dime off the table.” While Larry usually walked away from the table with everything he wanted, he was always careful…