First Things | Practical Productivity / Efficiency / Life Balance / Purpose / Passion / Identity / Happiness - Brandon Vaughn, Ph.D.

Many of us have been lied to.  We were told that play is trivial. That it is a waste of time …unnecessary … childish. And this is further from the truth. Play is essential in many ways. Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied over six thousand individuals and has concluded that play has the power to […]

I want to get personal today and tell you about some of my struggles (and successes) with Essentialism.  Also, I need your help!  I discuss some of the future of First Things podcast in this episode. I hope you will consider taking the first annual survey of First Things listeners.  The survey link is in […]

Do you know how to LOOK for essentialism in your life?  How to find the essential things in your life?  Many people struggle with this vital aspect. We discuss some exercises you can do to find that “signal” among the noise of your life.  If you know what to look for, it is often easier […]

Space … we all desperately need it, yet our society does not give us space by default.  We must proactively build space into our lives. We need to set aside time to take a breath, look around, and think. You need that level of clarity in order to innovate and grow.  We talk about the […]

You can do anything not everything.  Which problem do you want?  Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs.  It’s about deliberately choosing to be different. In this episode, we talk about the fallacy in which we think we must do everything.  The essentialist mindset, instead, realizes that we can do anything not everything. Click to Listen […]

Not everything in life is important … just a few … the vital few.  Most of what exists in the universe – our actions, and all other forces, resources, and ideas – has little value and yields little result.  On the other hand, a few things work fantastically well and have tremendous impact. We have […]

Choice, this is the very first pillar … the first mindset we need to embrace Essentialism.  It is the ability to choose that makes us human. We often think of choice as a thing. But a choice is not a thing. Our options may be things, but a choice—a choice is an action. Click to […]

Before we embark on the study of essentialism in detail, let’s first give an essentialism overview.  What is essentialism all about?  What is the big picture? Greg McKeown did an excellent lecture at Linkedin over this very issue.  We listen through Greg’s presentation in this episode as we prepare to land and explore the Essentialism […]

Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Do you sometimes feel overworked and underutilized? Do you feel motion sickness instead of momentum? Does your day sometimes get hijacked by someone else’s agenda? Have you ever said “yes” simply to please and then resented it? If you answered yes to any of these, the way […]

We suck at email … no really, we REALLY suck at email.  I’ve heard countless podcasts and read many books that talk about being more productive at email … “inbox zero” … creating tasks from emails … but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone talk about why we have such a hard time communicating […]

Depending on whom you ask, the road to success means different things. If you were to ask me, I’d say it means having a career that revolves around my real life. If you were to ask my cat, she’d say it involves finding a way to catch, immobilize and destroy her own tail. The first […]

Cultivating your passion requires a dedication to unstructured exploration. You have to leave large swathes of free time in your schedule, and fill this time with the exploration of things that might be interesting. Of equal importance, when something catches your attention you must leverage your free time to aggressively follow up.   Faced with the […]

Wow … 17 episodes on assertiveness!!  As we finish up this series on assertiveness, I thought it would be good to summarize what we have discussed for 17 episodes.  This episode is a bit longer than other episodes (one hour and 21 minutes, so be forewarned!). In this episode, we first go through a brief […]

How good are you at confronting someone? Do you, like most people, prefer to avoid confrontations? It turns out that the majority of people are pretty bad at confrontations and opt to dodge them whenever possible. The prospect stresses them out, and they’re even more anxious in the encounter. It’s not uncommon for people who […]

Confrontation countdown … A former colleague holds complete conversations in his head with people with whom he is angry. He rarely speaks directly with the other person. This anger in his mind continues to build because of his frustration, yet he never lets the other person know that he is frustrated and subsequently angry. His […]