Does it have to be? Too often, people in positions of power tend to become remote. They lose touch with the people who are affected by their decisions. They start keeping their guard up all the time – everyone starts to be seen as a supplicant, rival or potential threat. Power can be isolating. It can undermine the best part of people – it can make people lose touch with what they wanted to accomplish by gaining power in the first place. I have a mentor who is a high ranking executive. But he’s incredibly generous with his time, he’s connected, he’s engaged, and he’s...

As you get older, there are fewer and fewer people to impress. When you’re young, you have so many people to impress: teachers, classmates, your parents, your friends, parents of friends. You get a little older and you go to college. You’re constantly meeting new people, trying to make an impression, making snap judgments about whether people are “your kind of people” or not, trying to be liked, trying to fit in, trying to find your place. You finish college and go out into the real world. Now you have to impress your boss, your co-workers. After work you go to bars, parties,...

Circling back to the Tonight Show once again… I know this is old news, but I was rather surprised to read that Conan O’Brien had 190 people on his Tonight Show staff. (I’ve read that Jay Leno has a similar number of staffers on his show.) This seems like a huge number of people. Why do they need 200 staffers just to put on a 42-minute TV show? (Half of which is taken up by musical acts and celebrity interviews.) I’m sure that the Tonight Show staff are working hard, but how many people do you need to put on a comedy show? How many writers does it take to write a late night...

This article from the N.Y. Times talks about how the leaders of South Africa are becoming so blatantly corrupt that people are calling for “lifestyle audits” to find out how public servants in a not-terribly-wealthy country can afford BMWs and designer watches. I don’t mean to pick on South Africa, because corruption is a problem in lots of countries all over the world. It’s a tough problem to solve. Once a place develops an entrenched culture of political corruption, bribes and embezzlement from the public coffers, it often becomes hard to stop – and hard to find people...

If you want to learn how to make money on Elance – how to write effective bids that get results, how to make the best use of your time in bidding on projects, and how to command a higher hourly rate for your work, then I have an eBook to recommend. It’s called 7 Elance Bidding Strategies That Work by J. Smith Adams. J. Smith Adams and I got acquainted on Twitter back when I was first starting out on Elance. At the time, he had a blog called “Elance Money” with a lot of the same ideas that are now part of his eBook.  J. Smith Adams’ ideas were hugely influential in how I got my start...