If you ski, try not to fall near the lift. Yard sales are hard enough without an audience. But from the lift you’ll also see snowboarders hunting for trouble on purpose: rails, jumps and half pipes. In terrain parks, they don’t call those things obstacles. They call them features. In this episode, I’m sharing the first soundtrack from my brand new book, The Three Minute Mindset: Obstacles are features. We’ll talk about difficult coworkers, surprise bills (like an $8,000 air conditioner during a Nashville heat dome), and a five-city week full of delayed flights. You’ll get a question to get you thinking and an action to get you moving. Plus, find out how to get the audiobook free when you pre-order. Here’s to the features.

Some tasks are dead ends. Some are dominos. In this episode, part of my four episode series on prioritization, I’m teaching you the final question to ask when your to do list feels overwhelming: does this task make other tasks possible? A domino task unlocks a chain reaction of other important work, while a dead end task just gets done and stops there. I’ll walk you through a real example from my own week, comparing a low stakes lunch meeting to a high stakes speech description, and show you exactly how the four prompts (promise, money, deadline, domino) helped me figure out what to tackle first. Plus, you’ll hear two hilarious stories from my wife’s 96 year old grandfather, a Navy veteran, because sometimes the best lessons come with the best stories attached. And a warning: don’t overthink this process. Go fast, give it a star, and move on.