Swift Straw Blog

I recently listened to a podcast with Mark Manson who is authoring a new book with actor Will Smith. After spending several months with Will traveling the world working on various projects, he was amazed at how much Will actually gets done in a given day. When he asked Will how he does it, here are...

The other day I heard a great interview with Jeff Bezos. Here are a few takeaways:

This year we opened up a new harvesting operation in Mississippi. Since the terrain is totally different than anything we have ever worked in before, we had to discover and create an entirely new process from scratch. Over the last few months we have worked tirelessly, testing different types of...

Mindset is such a critical part of success.  With the right mindset anything is possible.  With the wrong mindset nothing is possible.  Here are a few examples to compare a growth mindset to a fixed mindset:

What would you think if someone gave you a bag of dog food and told you that it was guaranteed to make your dog severely over weight, highly fatigued AND increase their risk of cancer by 500%. Oh, and they would also be guaranteed to develop some type of chronic illness that would require...

As a society we are very quick to focus on suppressing symptoms. Just look at modern medicine where there is a pill for every ill. You can suppress heart burn with a purple pill, or you could discover which foods are causing the heart burn and stop eating those? When it comes to our physical...

Robert Frost said, “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self confidence.”  

Last week I released a blog about learning to overcome the natural human tendency of “Being Right” so that we can make mistakes with a smile.  Another detrimental human tendency that we must overcome in order to grow as a person and as a leader is the tendency to block ideas that are not our own.

I am in the process of re-reading one of my favorite books of all time, “Blue Ocean Strategy.”  We have all heard that a strategy is only as good as a team’s ability to execute.  In Blue Ocean Strategy, they use the concept of Fair Process to describe the most effective way to execute on a strategy.