concentrate every minute like a roman

Concentrate every minute like a Roman – like a man – on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can – if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override and what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Modern Library. 2003. p.18, Book 2, #5. Also see The Internet Classics Archive | The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (mit.edu)

none of them can hurt me

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Modern Library. 2003. p.17, Book 2, #1. Also see The Internet Classics Archive | The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (mit.edu)

a keen observer of corporate cultures

As a young man, I was fortunate to spend two years in Spain. The Spanish culture was rich and intriguing, yet also opaque and mysterious. Those years opened my eyes to the world and how other people experience life. One of the most salient lessons was the importance of culture. Culture can be both an enabler, and a stumbling block. It can bind people in unity or pit them against each other.  As a result, I’ve been a keen observer of corporate cultures throughout my career. The interplay between leadership and culture is similarly fascinating. Leaders either engender and move forward the culture, or they can drag it down by tacitly allowing their teams to violate it. As practitioners, we know how critical it is to recruit leaders that can articulate how they’ve built up the culture and inspired their teams to do the same…. 

Edward Stanworth

Meet Edward Stanworth (video). Global Leader Group. Accessed January 10, 2023

the best thing is subtraction

Shopify will be eliminating all recurring meetings involving more than two people in a bid to give employees more time to work on other tasks, Kaz Nejatian, vice president of product and chief operating officer at Shopify told employees in a Tuesday email viewed by Fortune.

The changes, which are effective immediately, will also see no events at all scheduled on Wednesdays, while any large meetings involving more than 50 people can only be held on Thursdays between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Big meetings are limited to one per week.

The changes to Shopify’s operating structure will eliminate 10,000 company events or the equivalent of more than 76,500 hours of meetings, a company spokesperson told Fortune.

Nejatian called the policy change a “useful subtraction,” which would free employees from excessive amounts of time currently spent in meetings. In his email to employees on Tuesday, he urged them not to add any meetings back to their calendars for at least two weeks, and to be “really critical” when deciding whether to add a meeting back to schedules at all.

Shopify CEO Lütke referred to the approach as a “calendar purge” in a statement to Fortune.

“The best thing founders can do is subtraction,” he in a recent interview with The Knowledge Project Podcast. “It’s much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time.”

Tristan Bove

"Shopify is axing all meetings involving more than two people in a remote work ‘calendar purge’ that the company itself calls ‘fast and chaotic’," Fortune. Jan. 4, 2023

we are the change that we seek

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. 

Barack Obama

"Barack Obama’s Feb. 5 Speech," New York Times. Feb. 5, 2008. As found in 2022 Great Quotes from Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes from Leaders Who Shaped the World.