Over the years I’ve done a lot of volunteering.  Some of the roles were awesome, fun, and energizing.  Others, well, let’s just say they made me wonder how soon I could head home. As I look back I realize that my involvement in each volunteering opportunity was hit or miss.  I’d sign up for something to “give it a try.”  Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn’t.  There wasn’t a strategy in how I decided where to volunteer.  More importantly, however, organizations didn’t have a strategy for ...

I spend a lot of time trying not to suck. I realize that’s rather blunt.  But it’s true.  Often my biggest motivator is fear of being terrible.  I don’t want to turn in a crummy project to a client because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m an idiot.  I edit, and re-edit (and sometimes re-re-edit) blog posts because I don’t want people to think I’m a lousy* writer.  I’m driven to succeed because I’m afraid of failure.  Afraid of being laughed at. And I bet you are too. Yet the  ...

Can robots make a good sandwich?  That’s a question that has plagued philosophers since the time of Aristotle.  But before I give you the answer, let’s look at why this is important.  (Although if you’ve been following Meaning to Work on Twitter, then you’d already know the answer.) For starters, sandwich making robots are clearly the holy grail of science fiction.  Which means we’re one step closer to living in the future. A future with great sandwiches! But more than that, this has practical implications for ...

The former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca once said: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” That’s sound advice. And something I want to apply to the next year. But before we get to 2012, let’s take a look at what my goals were for 2011. I set aside three SMART goals for 2011. If I hit those goals, I will consider 2011 a success They were: 1.  To finish the second round of editing my book on managing volunteers by the 1st of ...

Yesterday I met a nurse who had been at her job for 35 years.  As hard to believe as that is, she wasn’t alone.  Another nurse, that very same day, was retiring after 40 years.  Both had been at the same hospital for their entire careers. Hearing this tells me two things. 1. This must be an amazing hospital if people are willing to spend (literally) a lifetime working there. 2. These nurses love what they do. It’s this second point I want to focus on.  To most of us working ...

Does having an empathetic boss improve the quality of your work?  According to research, the answer would be “yes.” We often think of empathy as “feeling your pain.”  (Thanks Bill Clinton!)  But it’s actually more than that.  True empathy is the ability to recognize and relate to other people’s emotional states.  Both the good and bad emotional states. So how does this relate to our work? Well, all of us experience aches and pains in our daily lives.  Maybe we have a chronic illness.  Maybe we’re just sick.  Or maybe ...

So the Post Office has announced some major changes to fight off the billions of dollars of debt they’ve accumulated doing business.  The three biggest changes are laying off about 28,000 workers, raising the price of stamps by a penny and making sure your first class mail takes longer to get to it’s destination. Now look, I admit I’m not an MBA.  I’m not a CEO of a fortune 50 company.  I haven’t even slept at a Holiday Inn Express recently.  And here at Meaning ...

Ah, November.  The time when we celebrate what’s arguably the best monthly tradition on the calendar?  It’s hard to believe that as it closes, we once again wrap up another National Novel Writing Month.  (What?  You thought I was going to talk about Thanksgiving?) For the second year in a row I managed to complete a 50,000 word book.  And yes, I did that in a month.  This is both impossibly harder, and wonderfully easier than it sounds.  Make no doubt about it, 50,000 words is a ...

I never liked Thanksgiving. It was the holiday that was smashed between the candy-sugary goodness of Halloween and the present-filled awesomeness of Christmas.  It was simply the overlooked holiday.  At best it was a time to stuff my face.  At worst it was a time that inconvenienced my life’s schedule. But as I get older the more this changes.  Sure I still love trick-or-treat, Christmas presents, and vacation days.  But I also realize just how much I have to be thankful for.  This has been a challenging year on ...

“George Whitefield, the famous evangelist, writes of the Puritans:    Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross; the Spirit of Christ and of glory then rests upon them.” (Whitefield. Works. IV:306f) So how do you avoid pain in life? Actually you can’t.  It’s a trick questions.  Life isn’t about avoiding pain – it’s about embracing the opportunities you have to make a difference.  It’s about leading with love.  It’s about not giving up when things get hard.  It’s about taking your meaning and applying it ...