by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
Failing entrepreneur: “My problem is money.”
Entrepreneurship Coach: “No, your problem is trying to do everything yourself. Finding people is your job.”
…
One of Sirolli’s current goals is to work with business schools to shift the nature of entrepreneurial education. “Most schools teach entrepreneurs that they must have all the skills—product, marketing, financial management. They reward students for putting together a go-it-alone business plan instead of collaborating or identifying who they need to start a business with. In this way, [the schools] often set their students up for failure.”
…
I told [the trainee coach], “There are just two things you should never do. Don’t initiate anything yourself and never try to motivate people.”
The newly anointed [Entrepreneurship Coach] objected that it would be a disaster to rely on locals for ideas, but promised to do “nothing” until given different instructions. Within two months, he had 46 projects under way.
–Ernesto Sirolli, Ph.D.
The Entrepreneurship Coach
by Sally Helgesen
in Strategy + Business
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
The founder and driving force of “Positive Psychology” has summarized his lifetime of research in this accessible book for the lay reader. Though padded with the usual flab of today’s nonfiction–refutations of criticisms most readers have never encountered, tangential personal anecdotes, and repetition–the substance of his findings are practical and enlivening. Dr. Seligman even summarizes the components of a life well lived in a mnemonic acronym.
P – E – R – M – A
- Positive emotion,
- Engagement [A/K/A Flow]
- positive Relationships,
- Meaning, and
- Accomplishment.
I prefer F – A – M – E – S, if only for the irony, since fame is at best a fleeting and ancillary aspect of a satisfying life.
- Flow, escaping the self through challenging activity
- Accomplishment & Progress
- Meaning, a generative story
- Experiencing welcome emotions
- Social Support
Details below.
Selected excerpts
Flourish:
A Visionary New Understanding of
Happiness and Well-being
by Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D.
Atria Books. 2011-04-05
Page numbers from Kindle Edition.
[Tony’s comments in square brackets.]
PREFACE This book will help you flourish. There, I have finally said it. I have spent my professional life avoiding (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals
The end of one calendar year and the beginning of the next naturally brings reflections on our progress and plans. Apply scientifically proven methods to your goal setting and New Year’s resolutions with these free tools from Top Executive Coach Tony Mayo.
Here’s hoping that, with these tools and some solid coaching, your New Year is actually new and different. Good luck.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
The founder and CEO of Amazon seems to agree with Dan Pink’s famous TED video that incentive compensation plans can be detrimental to creativity, cooperation and–ultimately–companies.
We pay very low cash compensation relative to most companies. We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.
—Amazon’s Jeff Bezos:
The ultimate disrupter
in Fortune Management
The upside for workers is in Amazon stock. That is quite an incentive, amounting to $20+ billion for Bezos and millions for many individual employees.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Stress Management
I have written before about the health, mind, and business benefits of walking. I even went so far as to build a treadmill desk so I can walk while using my computer. To bolster your motivation toward movement read this overview of clinical and anecdotal evidence assembled by Arianna Huffington. New in 2022, this from Science News: Do we get our most creative ideas when walking?
The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.
—Henry David Thoreau
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Team Manager Skills
Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.
…
The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book Drive offers a nice summary of this literature.)
These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”
–Cal Newport, Ph.D.
New York Times
September 30, 2012
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Fun
During the 1980s, I was an avid admirer of Ayn Rand‘s philosophy of Objectivism. The greatest expression of this devotion was the following short story. The germ of the idea came from this news event. I was very proud of my story at the time. I offered it to only three magazines. I was shocked by their responses.
My rejection letters from
The New Yorker and Esquire are below.
The Atlantic Monthly did not bother to respond.
Reading the story now, it seems much more righteous and judgmental than I admit to being today. I still love the rhythm of certain sentences, the cinematic clarity of the settings and some of the word play, for example, the double meaning of the title and the triple meaning of DRILLER. Comments are welcome, of course, but please remember that I am no longer the author. He has grown away.
You can read it below this line or click here to download an Adobe PDF that is prettier to print.
Relative Evil
by Anthony P. Mayo
He pressed his fingers to the throb in his temple. Not to ease the pain, but to focus on the rhythmic pressure and blot out his sister’s insistence. Her unpersuasive words sought to compensate with repetition and emotion what they lacked in evidence and reason.
“Please Randall, if ever family mattered it is really important now.” Yes, Rachel, he thought as she talked. I know family matters, that is exactly why I am sitting at your kitchen table on a weekday morning. Being part of this family is why his day had detonated from the usual historical exposition to this hysterical exposition. If he were not born a Fleischer, Randall would still be at his desk, working on his next book.
Randall had just finished his daily preparing-to-get-ready-to-start-to-write rituals and was about to fill the computer screen with historical in-sight when the telephone rang. The first surprise was that the caller was his literary agent. Franklin called for only two reasons, either to report that Randall’s latest book had been sold to a publisher or to report that the publisher was impatient to receive the final draft of Randall’s latest book. Since Errors of Democracy had been purchased only three months ago, he could not imagine a reason for this interruption.
“Rand, what is your father’s first name?”
“Otto. And my mother’s maiden name was Calabrisi.” Randall was playful. “Is this some kind of identity check, Franklin? Are you going to pass along a secret message to me?”
“I’m afraid its no secret, friend. Something terrible has happened. The news is filled with reports that your father was… Rand, do you know what your father did during the war?”
(more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Stress Management
Overthinking ushers in a host of adverse consequences:
It sustains or worsens sadness, fosters negatively biased thinking, impairs a person’s ability to solve problems, saps motivation, and interferes with concentration and initiative. Moreover, although people have a strong sense that they are gaining insight into themselves and their problems during their ruminations, this is rarely the case. What they do gain is a distorted, pessimistic perspective on their lives.
–Sonja Lyubomirsky
The How of Happiness
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals
I apologize for the length of this letter/speech/memo/blog post. If I had more time it would have been shorter.
That keen insight into effective writing has been attributed to many great communicators, from Virgil to Voltaire. Respect for the reader’s time requires the writer to carefully pare all but the most essential aspects of the message. Editing has the added benefit of helping the writer clarify and sharpen his or her own thinking. If you cannot express the essentials briefly and accurately your confusion and uncertainty will distract and annoy the reader. To write fewer words, think more.
Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, admitted to a colleague that he did not have an adequate understanding of Quantum ElectroDynamics, despite the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize for inventing it.
Feynman’s criterium for understanding was to express it in a lecture comprehensible by a college freshman.
Your business plan is the document that most deserves intense thought and editing to make it concise, persuasive, and motivating. Everyone in your business needs to (more…)
by Tony Mayo | Client Comments
Tony Mayo is the executive’s career coach. His expertise, professionalism, and RESULTS are impressive. My experience in evaluating career goals, strategy and navigation through the waters of change, with Tony’s coaching, have landed me my dream situation.
When one is challenged with questions regarding trust, motivation, advice, and crisis management, Tony will provide honest, impartial assistance to help you make the right decisions with the BIG picture in mind.
I give Tony the highest, unreserved, recommendation as a career coach for individuals or companies.
—Dr. Valerie Armstead
Professor of Anesthesiology
St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center
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