I remember the first time I saw Back To The Future. I was hooked and couldn’t wait to see the rest of the trilogy. It blew my mind, and I wondered what I would do if I could go back in time. What would I see if I went forward in time? Would I (eventually) make some mistake that would cost me my guitar playing skills forever – or would I go on to greatness?
With that, here are the ways I time travel back into the past as well as travel forward in the future, and then successfully return to the present. Proceed with caution, use at your own risk, and kids – don’t try this at home.
Tagged in learning
After a series of development mishaps this week, Sid Savara, discovered that his project was at risk of not being completed in time.
As the deadline loomed, Sid was hopelessly behind schedule. Unable to work through implementation as quick as he had hoped, the deadline was going to get the better of him. Tradeoffs needed to be made, long hours and additional developers were considered: everything was on the table. Sid thus considered his options, made a decision, and lived with the fall out.
Tagged in learning
We’ve all experienced it: that surge of powerful motivation at the start of a project. We’re on top of the world and feel unstoppable.
Yet somehow, after a few weeks, that motivation high has gone. New blogs, new year’s resolutions to diet and workout routines can soon become burdens as we lose our enthusiasm for them.
From the time we embark on a new project until we are deeply entrenched in following through with it long term, we go through a few different changes and emotional highs and lows: fluctuations that aren’t so different than what we experience elsewhere in our lives.
Read on as we consider these parallels, and then, using lessons from our emotional lives, discuss strategies for coping when our enthusiasm for a project fades.
Tagged in learning
Want to play video games and learn lessons you can apply elsewhere in life? Look no fruther than NCAA Football 09, in Dynasty Mode.
In Dynasty mode, you coach a college football program through multiple seasons and you can only improve your team long term by mastering the recruitment process. Read on as I discuss goal setting, priotization and persistence: all lessons learned from playing NCAA Football 09.
Tagged in learning
Various authors and speakers encourage writing down concrete goals, and use as evidence a study conducted on students in the 1979 Harvard MBA program. They point to the results of that study (where the 3 percent of written goal setters earned 10 times as much as the other 97 percent of the class combined) as proof and inspiration for students and readers.
The study has been quoted in seminars and books by Zig Ziglar, Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy and many other motivational and personal development speakers – but is the study true, or an urban legend? Find out in this feature report.
Tagged in learning
“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
- John of Salisbury
Today, anyone can buy an MP3 player, download some podcasts and transform their headphones into a mobile classroom. We can access discussions, explanations – and my favorite, solutions from the best minds of today and yesterday.
Rather than going through the process of trial and error ourselves, we can benefit from other people who have already made the mistakes and distilled those lessons into concise explanations.
Tagged in learning
