Are you familiar with this image? Some people see the young woman first, some the old woman. And often they have trouble seeing the other even when someone points it out, “See her hooked nose? Her scarf?” Everything that happens in our lives is like this, open to interpretation. Typically though we stop at seeing what’s […]
You know that moment when you’re “officially” on vacation? You’ve crossed off the last task on your “get done before vacation” to-do list. Set your email auto-responder. Told everyone, see you in two weeks! And yet, you can’t seem to get out of work mode. You think of an email you need to send. Information the client […]
One of my good friends recently did something that surprised me. She bought a juicer. And not just any juicer — a top-of-the-line $300 cold press juicer. She’s also signed up for personal training sessions, after talking about starting to work out again for over a year. What surprised me was there was no obvious […]
I was speaking with a former client yesterday. He’s super smart, with a PhD in nanotechnology. He’s lived across Europe and Asia, and has a gift for connecting with people. He’s also a talented artist, whose work has been exhibited in public. And yet, he’s feeling stuck. Bored even. He wants to find work he can feel passionate about, where […]
Several years ago, I decided to enter a piano competition. I had about six months to prepare and my goal was to practice two hours a day during the week and three hours on weekends. Just to be clear, this was something I had voluntarily chosen. Sitting at the keyboard is not physically strenuous. The piano was […]
In the world of basketball, everyone’s talking about the Houston Rockets — and not for the right reasons. In Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, they were up against the Golden State Warriors, the team to beat going into the finals for the fourth year in a row. The Rockets had spent the last […]
You know the phrase, “Be careful what you wish for”? In the weeks since I got back from my cycling vacation in Spain last month, I’ve been saying to people — with great conviction — “I want to spend less time in front of my computer.” Now, what I meant was, I want to spend […]
“Leading a meeting, negotiating a deal, doing an interview — you need to think of these as performances,” I used to tell clients. I said that to focus them on preparation and practice rather than doing things on the fly and wondering why they didn’t go well. But then I realized, wait, we already feel […]
When I decided I wanted to live in Paris, I started with a few simple steps — watching more French movies, taking French lessons and even getting a duvet cover with a photograph of a Parisian street on it. Then I started taking two-week visits every few months. I reached out to incubators to give […]
Once upon a time, I lived a magical life in Japan. There, opportunities unfolded in incredible ways, with ideal timing and ease: I put an ad in the local newspaper to teach piano. Within weeks, I had a roster of Japanese housewife students paying $100 an hour. An American friend was moving back to the […]