Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?   The answer may depend on what you need out of life at the time when the question arises.  If you’d like to feel good about your status, bask in the glow of some admiration, […]

Epicurus, a Greek philosopher born 341 years before Jesus who lived until he was 72, in biblical numbers, three score years and twelve.  He would have lived longer if they’d known how to remove stones from the urinary tract back then.  The first known operations for that excruciating condition were in the 16th century and […]

It’s the meaning of life!  For a lot of philosophers, pleasure is why we are here, it’s the meaning of life and here’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe telling us how to get it.  That’s pretty big! Some philosophers refer to happiness instead of pleasure and a few tell us that although it isn’t necessarily why […]

Oh-oh, absorb this one for a little while and you might think we’ve gone all Karmic and pop-science-weird.  Maybe Geoff; normally Mr. can’t-stop-quoting-psychology has fallen off the edge of reality.  But panic not, there is plenty of legitimate behavioural science underpinning this idea and more than enough reasons why you ought to consider adopting the […]

I once got reprimanded by a delegate on a caravan sales course for spelling Shakespeare incorrectly, putting Shakespear under one of his quotations – possibly this one.  It being a Shakespearean error, I bowed theatrically and apologised for the offence I had caused the learned sire.  It was an honest mistake, almost certainly influenced by […]

Theory:  A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. I’m a theorist.  I have to be to be able to provide training courses.  It is necessary for me to completely understand the ‘something’ and also to know ‘the general […]

Richard Flint is an unusual man.  He operates across the United States out of Florida as a conference speaker, coach, management trainer and more.  He’s unconventional not just in that he continues to work way past the point most people would retire, nor in his penchant for the very loudest of loud Hawaiian shirts (I’ve […]

One for our times.  There is no limit to looking upward – thank goodness!  But why upward? Because our emotional state (internal) affects our behaviour (external) and thinking affects our emotional state – often generating a sequence of changing emotions as we process whatever thoughts we are having at the time – thinking ends up […]

It was tempting to do this one first, such is the importance of the message it carries.  But, congruence parallels efficiency, a bit of a mouthful isn’t it!  So, we started with something more straight-forward and here we are at our second instalment and I couldn’t wait any longer. The quote came directly from the […]

This is the first of many of my favourite quotations which I intend to thoroughly investigate one by one.  For me, nothing could be more natural than unravelling the deeper meaning in the short phrase handed down, perhaps by some giant of philosophy whose wisdom has survived some 87 generations of potentially withering academic scrutiny.  […]