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What does it mean to have influence? Maybe a better question, what does it mean to be a person of influence? The definition of influence includes the word ‘power’, as in the power to affect something, the power to sway based on prestige, ability, position, notoriety, or message. We...
If you’ve been listening to this show for any period of time, you know that I love questions. I love questions because, without them and without good ones, you don’t get answers to things. Everything we do, everything we create, everything we get paid for starts with a question or a...
In April 1928 a journal called “The Forum” published an interview with the famed automaker, Henry Ford, who was talking about the very apparent increase in the complexity and rapidity of life at that time. What he said in that interview has since become an oft used quote, although...
If a stranger had walked up to me on the street when I was 19 or 20 years old and said, “Blaine, these are the only 5 questions you’ll ever need to ask and answer for yourself if you want to lead a fulfilling and meaningful life”, I’m not exactly sure what I...
Wisdom, it typically comes with age, life experience, making mistakes and learning from them, having adventures, learning to subjugate the ego in exchange for knowledge, and having some level of humility. It means different things to different people, but all would agree that wisdom connotes...
If you’ve been following this show for the last few years, then you’ll know that I had a very interesting educational experience when I was 20 years old. I packed up my life and move to Chicago to live in a Zen monastery. I went there to study the martial art of Aikido under a...
I always considered myself an entrepreneur. My father introduced me to the concept of being an entrepreneur and I gained my understanding of what that meant simply from watching, doing, and reading about other entrepreneurs. I thought I knew what it meant to be an entrepreneur, that is until I...
One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned in life is that the quality of your questions determines the quality of the answers and outcomes. There is most definitely a correlation between asking good questions and getting better answers, and there is also a correlation between asking the...
You know what they say about opinions; they’re like (insert body part), everybody’s got one. And it’s true, unless the middle part of your brain has been damaged or removed, we all have opinions about certain things. Opinions are good, they’re healthy, until, of course,...
Since around the age of 16, I have been something of a collector. No, not comic books, not trinkets, not baubles, not those silly plates from boardwalk tourist shops. No, what I started collecting almost 36 years ago was advice. Advice that I thought was the best advice for a young kid who...
“You’re going to have to eventually fight real people…you know that, right?” That’s what the voice standing behind me said. I was 19 at the time and I was really going at it on the heavy bag at the karate school I had been training at. I was fairly new at the time...
When I was 19 years old, I decided I wanted some adventure in my life, so I applied to and was accepted into a very unique live-in student program in Chicago studying Zen meditation and the martial art of Aikido. One of the first things the founder and chief instructor of the program said to me...
