I am starting to use Twitter to share brief daily messages. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.
Here are my recent tweets (messages):
What I want most is to want less.
…
Creativity is looking at the old and seeing the new.
…
My gratitude story for (more…)
Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
—Vaclev Havel
Twice President of Czechoslovakia
While driving home from a client’s office, I felt some strange symptoms. The kind of symptoms that could mean nothing or could be signs of impending death. The kind of symptoms you would feel foolish wasting the hospital’s time with or could burden your family permanently. What to do?
Luckily, I have a great relationship with a first-rate internist and his office was near the next highway exit. I didn’t go there directly, of course. I telephoned my wife to let her talk me out of being concerned. Instead, she met me at the doctor’s office.
My doctor immediately (more…)
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
I certainly would not have begun, much less finished, this book if the author and subject had not become so important. It is disjointed and rambling, parts memoir and parts abstract essay, and needed a firm edit to clarify its message. Separate from all that, however, is Barack Obama’s keen insight into race, belonging, and living a meaningful life. Listening to such a brilliant and compassionate person is time well spent. Also evident is his intuitive recognition of the power of conversation to create a world and a future, a foundation distinction for executive coaching. My favorite examples:
p. 287 That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of (more…)
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
These wisdoms are for the luring of youth toward
high moral altitudes. The author did not
gather them from practice, but from
observation.
To be good is noble,
but to show others how
to be good is nobler
and no trouble.
–Mark Twain in
Following the Equator
While acting as a developmental liaison to PingMedia’s revolutionary pro audio over IP appliance, I found Tony to be thoroughly engaging. [Executive coach Tony Mayo was CEO of PingMedia.]
His quest for excellence and dedication to honest, open analysis by professionals such as myself created a truly revolutionary product. An excellent listener, brilliant in intellect, and all over great guy, Tony values family and friends, as we value him.
–Brad McIlvaine
Manager, Post Production Operations
National Geographic Television
My friend Andy Sherman has collected a life’s wisdom accumulated from years of advising businesses into his 18th book, Road Rules: Be the Truck. Not the Squirrel. Learn the 12 Essential Rules for Navigating the Road of Life He has allowed me to make the first chapter available for free here. Read, enjoy, and prosper.
Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.
Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet – it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System.
Stuart A. Kauffman, PhD. in
BEYOND REDUCTIONISM:
Reinventing The Sacred
Lady Macbeth’s suicide note, read by her husband:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Macbeth, the king, reacts with:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Thanks for this interpretation is due to David Blixt.
Flow:
The Psychology of Optimal Experience
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Ph.D.
Excellent description, Doctor, where’s the prescription?
Professor Csikszentmihalyi has done a great service by distilling his decades of research into happiness and satisfaction into a well constructed single volume. He writes with wit, insight, and character. His vast learning is often evident but never overbearing.
The book ultimately fails, however, for it invests all of its considerable power in describing Flow and convincing the reader to seek this optimal experience but does too little to (more…)
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.
Because unless you believe that the future can be better you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.
If you assume there is an instinct for for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world.
The choice is yours.
–Noam Chomsky
American linguist and political activist
I feel more like a leader with my people. More focused. I have more guts. Learned to let go of minutia.
–Burk Beale
Boone Beale
A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.
French humanist essayist 1533-92
I went through extreme depressions, glooms. There was one occasion on which I decided actually to commit suicide.
I’d got into this state — I was working as a lab assistant at the school, and what would happen was that I’d make tremendous efforts to push myself up to a level of optimism. I’d do it in the evenings by reading poetry, thinking, writing in my journals, then I’d go back to the school the next day and blaaahhh, right down to the bottom again. This was the feeling of The Mind Parasites — there’s something that waits until you’ve got lots of energy and just sucks you dry like a vampire. This sudden feeling that God was (more…)
Recent Comments