I write a lot about productivity. But productivity only matters if you have a reason to be productive. If you don’t have the motivation, then waking up early, setting up to-do lists and changing habits seems silly. When you feel apathetic, you might have a lot of extra time, and still end up procrastinating.

Recently, a reader asked me what to do about this problem. He wasn’t depressed, he was just bored. There was no motivation to do anything more than the bare minimum.

Apathy is a common problem. I’ve had certainly had motivational dry spells. While I don’t think there is an instant cure to this problem, I’ve noticed that apathy is usually caused by one of two problems:

1. You don’t have any goals.
2. You’re working on the wrong goals

Setting Goals to Combat Apathy

Apathy sets in when you forget what you want. Finding motivation needs to start by focusing on your desires. Not the goals other people have pushed on you. Not the goals you think are reasonable or practical. Not the goals you feel you should have. But the goals that fill you with enthusiasm.

If I find myself starting to slip into apathy, I try to reconnect with what I want. I get out a piece of paper and write out all the things I’d like to do, be or accomplish. These can be little goals or huge, unrealistic dreams that might never be finished. The point of this exercise isn’t to be reasonable. It’s to focus you back on the things that drive you.

If you write down ideas on a piece of paper, but you don’t feel inspired, you’re doing it wrong. Sometimes it takes a few minutes of writing out mild interests before you break into your true desires.

When you’re finished the brainstorm, you might not have a lot of usable ideas. Many of your dreams might seem completely out of reach or highly improbable. That’s okay. But at least you have a starting point. You now have a roadmap of the things that fill you with motivation.

Usually, at this point, it’s a good idea to pick one or two of the idea you’ve written down and set a goal around it. The next step is to write it down, make a plan and set a deadline. Those last steps are helpful, but they aren’t as important as having a goal that motivates you. The motivation and working on a goal are far more valuable than actually reaching it. Click here to continue »

Email is a great tool if used properly. Unfortunately, that’s a big “if”. I’ve written this list to compile what I feel are the worst misuses of email. Hopefully you aren’t an offender, but if you are, consider yourself warned. I won’t be coming after you, but some of your friends might.

Violation #1 - Not Responding to Emails that Need Replies

If I ask for a response, give me a response! If I don’t get a reply back to my email, even if you are just writing to say you can’t help me, I’ll think my message wasn’t read at all. With overzealous spam filters and email gremlins, it isn’t uncommon for mail to hit the trash before it is read.

I could never understand people who commit this crime, but some plausible reasons (but not excuses) for not replying to obvious requests include:

1. Don’t have the time.
2. Can’t help/don’t know the answer.
3. Don’t know the answer or have the information yet.

The first is a case of laziness. It takes 15 seconds to write a reply to an email, even if it just states that you got their message but can’t reply. Letting the person know you don’t have time to reply is better than ignoring them entirely.

With the second case and third cases you should still send an email, even if you can’t give a meaningful response. Just a short note to let them know that you read their message. If you can’t answer, tell them. It will save the wait and let that person ask someone else. If you can’t answer now, give an estimated time when you might be able to reply.
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Recently I discovered some excellent new self improvement podcasts, and in doing so I was reminded just how beneficial podcasts have been my development. Apart from the interesting and insightful content they can contain, podcasts are a perfect way to work in multiple positives. That is, they give me the opportunity to feed my brain with self improvement material while commuting to work, going for a walk, working out or a number of other activities.

The following is a list of my 10 favorite self improvement podcasts (in alphabetical order). It includes some old favorites (Steve Pavlina and Robin Sharma), as well as the new discoveries that prompted this article (Genius Types and We The Change). Enjoy… Click here to continue »

After a 10-year study of over 24,000 employees across multinational corporations, our team came to a startling conclusion about leadership: the more you develop yourself as a leader, the less of a leader you are.

How could this be? We ourselves were dumbfounded when we asked the leaders of Fortune 500 companies for the key to their success. They each had the same answer: “Don’t ask me. I didn’t do anything!”

Finally, however, the answer became very clear: the leader does not shape the organization. It’s the culture.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, any day of the week. So the successful leaders were the ones who stopped focusing on themselves, and created a world class culture. This made their leadership appear “effortless” to both them and everyone around them because they leveraged the strength of the entire group, or as we say, “tribe.”

This leads to a very important finding: if you are empowering yourself instead of your tribe, you are hurting your company.

So it doesn’t matter how many books you read, it doesn’t matter how much training you’ve had, it doesn’t even matter if you are strong at execution. You could be checking off to-do’s left and right with efficiency that would make David Allen cry, and yet still you would not create a thriving organization.

Tribal Culture

We now know the key to having a world class organization is to develop a world class culture. But what is culture exactly? And where can it be seen?

A better question is actually where can culture be heard, because culture lives in language. If you think about it, most of our work is made up of communication…emails, meetings, documents, proposals, instructions… they all live in the domain of language.

After 10 years of study we realized there are 5 stages of language that determine the culture of the tribe:
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