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Beethoven’s Counterintuitive Productivity Secret
The fourth quarter is almost here—the year’s final stretch, when projects intensify and goals push for closure. It’s the season when pressure quietly mounts and rest, though deeply needed, can feel like a luxury. Yet some of history’s greatest creators understood something we often forget: progress depends as much on deliberate rest as on effort.…
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Do You Want to Spend Your Life as a Hunter and Gatherer of Income?
The title of the post, is straight out of Thomas J. Stanley’s ‘Millionaire Women Next Door.’ In his introduction he talks about hunter gathering, versus cultivating wealth. He questions whether we would like to continue hyperconsuming versus becoming financially independent? His question is a deceptively simple one, especially if you’ve built a reputation, a business,…
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Everyone’s Hard Thing, is their Hard Thing
Note: This post references character backstories and early plot elements from the ITV series Coldwater. While it doesn’t give away the show’s central mystery or ending, consider it a mild spoiler alert if you prefer to watch with no context at all. I heard the phrase on an episode of Coldwater, a British psychological thriller…
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Don’t Let Writers and Influencers Control Your Narrative
Jessica Grose’s recent New York Times review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation she describes a memoir that wants to be purely personal yet repeatedly drifts into the language of 12-step recovery and spiritual self-help. Gilbert insists she isn’t offering a program, but her story leans heavily…
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The Visionary Who Forced Madison Avenue to Take Black Buying Power Seriously
Picture America in 1970. Corporate boardrooms were almost entirely white and male. Major advertisers on Madison Avenue—the nerve center of U.S. marketing—saw the “general market” as code for white consumers. Black households, though representing billions of dollars in purchasing power, were either ignored or caricatured. Into that landscape stepped Earl G. Graves Sr. Brooklyn-born to…
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How Quickly Can You Dismantle Democracy Within an Organization?
Timothy Ryback’s The Atlantic piece, How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days, is a case study in speed and strategy. In less than two months, Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic—complete with constitution, free press, and elections—was hollowed out and replaced with a dictatorship. This isn’t about comparing leaders to Hitler. It’s about recognizing how systems…
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When Words Start Wars
Orem, Utah, September 10, 2025: Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was midway through a “Prove Me Wrong” campus debate when a single rifle shot ended his life. The scene—open-air forum, microphones humming, thousands of students—could hardly have been more emblematic of his chosen medium. Only weeks earlier he’d said, “When people…
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Scarcity isn’t about Economics
I’ve always had some kind of morning ritual, from as far back as I can remember. My current ritual is reading a chapter of Proverbs, reading a Daily Stoic entry, and reading an thinking on a card from a deck by Esther and Jerry Hicks about money. The card I’m pondering today says that the…
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The Consulting Crash We Were Warned About
In 2005, Martin Kihn cracked open a world that, until then, largely operated behind frosted-glass conference rooms and perfectly bound slide decks.His memoir, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, was part confession, part dark comedy, and part industry autopsy. Kihn wrote from the inside. As a…
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The Hidden Tax of Influence and the Real Cost of Outsourcing Transformation
In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, [you can listen to the interview here], BrenĂ© Brown named something rare that and also costly. She described the “care tax”—the hidden toll of being treated as a national therapist, expected not only to share ideas but to absorb people’s deepest stories of pain and trauma. After…
Clarity BEFORE Execution. Structure BEFORE Speed
High-stakes decisions deserve disciplined thinking
You don’t need to move faster.
You need to reduce unnecessary risk.
When your decision affects income, reputation, or stability,
pause with structure before you act.
Giselle Hudson | Pre-Decision Advisory for Leaders Under Pressure 