Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
A self-less, feel-good blog about love, life, and work by career coach and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
For whatever reason, the sky has cracked open and the Gods have chosen you. A column of light is shining down on the earth, brighter and hotter than the sun and it’s all on you.
It doesn’t take long to realize this is not the kind of thing you want to be chosen for.
You… Read more...
I’m so absent-minded this morning, I put on my reading glasses and then started looking for them on my desk.
Hard news does that. It takes you out of life and puts you in a stupor, in a murky haze with no walls and no exit.
I’ve been lucky. Not much hardship for me but,… Read more...
“I’ve always thought about doing that.”
I hear this from clients a lot and my response is always the same: Go do that!
This is not necessarily about your calling. It doesn’t matter if this thing becomes your career or not. What matters is that you scratch th… Read more...
Companies are founded on epiphanies.
It’s usually a single idea from one person or a small group of people. This idea is raised up, cleaned off, and put in a glass box.
Then that same group of people focuses on convincing: convincing each other, convincing engineers, convinci… Read more...
Raise your hand if you have too much on your plate.
Okay, time to delegate. The first step is figuring out what to unload. We all usually make it to this step and then get stuck. We know what we want to get rid of but we keep holding onto it and then perseverate on why we’re… Read more...
Oftentimes we have to see all other possibilities before we accept what we have.
It happens a lot. I will work with a client to generate alternative career ideas. We’ll talk for a few hours, we’ll do assessments to come up with lists of hundreds of job possibilities, W… Read more...
I’ve yet to be invited to give a commencement speech to a graduating class… but if I did I’d give this advice, above all:
Set aside 4 hours a week that you will, under no circumstances, overwrite with some other activity, even work, even play, even your very favo… Read more...
The older couple next to me does their ritual. One man unfolds the plastic wrap around a single sandwich and puts each half on separate plates. The other guy uncorks a bottle of wine and fills 2 plastic cups to exactly the same height. They sit in low-back chairs with their bare … Read more...
To give you an idea as to how much I think about helping people find their way…
As I was reading a self-help book written in the nineties, I found myself putting aside my own growth to counsel the previous owner of the book who had carefully underlined significant passages a… Read more...
I talk to a lot of people who have good reasons to give up, reasons I can’t (and don’t) challenge. Often they’re right. Things are dark, the doors have closed, and the hands have slipped into their sleeves. It’s hard to see, let alone walk.
But there is alw… Read more...