For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Productive givers focus on acting in the long-term best interests of others, even if it's not pleasant. They have the courage to give the critical feedback we prefer not to hear, but truly need to hear. They offer tough love, knowing that we might like them less, but we'll come to trust and respect them more.
Meditation isn't snake oil. For some people, meditation might be the most efficient way to reduce stress and cultivate mindfulness. But it isn't a panacea. If you don't meditate, there's no need to stress out about it.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
If an organization values innovation, you can assume it's safe to speak up with new ideas, leaders will listen, and your voice matters.
Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.
I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.
Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.
To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.
No one wants to hear everything that's in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.
If we want girls to receive positive reinforcement for early acts of leadership, let's discourage bossy behavior along with banning bossy labels. That means teaching girls to engage in behaviors that earn admiration before they assert their authority.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry - people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex and end up causing harm instead.
Successful givers secure their oxygen masks before coming to the assistance of others. Although their motives may be less purely altruistic, their actions prove more altruistic, because they give more.
In life, there's no such thing as an unmitigated good.
When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.
A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.
Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.
