Mike Mason
on
Conflict is an unavoidable consequence of large collaborative effort toward a common set of goals. We can do a lot to organize teams in a way to avoid too much conflict and we can create a culture that doesn’t break down when conflict arrises but it will occur nonetheless. Conflict occurs when two or more people are in disagreement or experience a clash of interests. It’s normal, and should [...]
Mike Mason
on
Post-covid meetings are changing. The ebb and flows of meeting fatigue is an endless cycle we’ve all sunk into. Your calendar slowly builds up with well-meaning re-occurrings, or you expand your sphere of influence and become a required voice on critical decisions. We can’t forget that we have 252 working days in a year, 1260 productive hours, and for many of us 882 of those hours are spent [...]
Mike Mason
on
If you’re like me, you spent more than 3000 days going to school. You spent 24,000 hours in and out of classes and countless more on homework assignments and test preparation. You were subjected to standardized “tests” that normalized your responses to questions and hypothetical problems relative to the performance of your peers. Forced to consume and memorize second-hand facts and frameworks, [...]
Mike Mason
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Alternative title: We’ve been setting goals all wrong. I recently purchased a few extra credits on Audible and was looking for books to listen to as I ride my bike when I found: A Guide to a Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. My initial thoughts were that the book might have a 50/50 chance of being a self-help book that I would drop after chapter 2. Those thoughts might have been justified [...]
Mike Mason
on
Note. this post comes from a place of introspection that I sometimes find difficult to find the proper wording for. It’s abstract in nature but still paints a picture that is worth not only discovering, but remembering too. This is why I’ve put it in writing. A lot of my recent posts have been about the automatic; decision making that is sometimes out of our control. Instinctual quirks that create [...]
Mike Mason
on
Alternative Title: Chase nuance, not novelty. A lot of what influences most of the content in these posts has to do with increasing rate of change. We live in a world vastly different than what came before it, and the gap between decades is getting wider. This stretching of the modern condition means the world you live in now will be drastically different than the one your grandchildren will grow [...]
Mike Mason
on
Alternative title: Being happy is mostly dependent on your frame of reference and an invisible force called anchoring. You walk into a 7-Eleven on a scorching day on the hunt for a tasty beverage that will cool you down and quench your unbearable thirst. You see the slushy machine with the Big Gulp sign, and you think to yourself, I haven’t had one of those in a WHILE, I’m going for it. You don’t [...]
Mike Mason
on
Alternate title: Does the (wo)man make the decision, or does the decision make the (wo)man? Decisions. We make decisions every day; every action is the result of a decision, whether we make it consciously or not. My decisions make me who I am, so it’s mind altering to ponder this topic in detail when you discover that many of the decisions you make aren’t made by “you.” We [...]
Mike Mason
on
Four years ago my grandfather passed away painlessly as he slept in his summer home on PEI. The summer before I had interviewed him and asked him what advice he would give to future generations. Here’s what he said: Stay the course. If we had an example to lay down then it would be engrained in our kids, and it turned out to be the best thing since we now enjoy grandkids. Of all the things he could [...]
Mike Mason
on
When I graduated from university I thought I was destined to work at an advertising agency. I reached out to former alumni from my school on LinkedIn, and wrote tons of custom cover letters telling my story. This went on for months until an entrepreneur starting a technology company took a chance on me and put me in charge of marketing his app. It’s worth mentioning that the job wouldn’t [...]