Type A Personalities The phrase type a refers to a pattern of behavior and personality associated with high achievement, competitiveness, and impatience. Does this sound like you? Does this sound like most C-level employees? Does this sound like most entrepreneurs and creatives? If you’re listening to this podcast you most likely are. Productivity and meaning You probably derive a lot of meaning from your productivity. You push harder and harder. Many people immerse themselves in their career and blink and then suddenly it’s 20+ years later. And they have to retire. And that word is terrifying ..read more

White Space The first known use of ‘White Space’ was back in 1946, and it means the area of a page without writing or pictures. It’s the part between the words, the part that allows us to pause and consider. it allows us to compartmentalize one set of thoughts from another. Social Media and the looooooong post Have you ever noticed posts on social media sometimes people post a few words, hit a couple hard returns, then say a few more until the post is about a foot tall? They do this to manipulate the way you read it. Each line becomes (presumably) an impactful statement. Guess what they are fo ..read more

Coach So what is a coach? And what is a life coach? “Life Coach” never really generated positive professional images in my mind, even though I’m considered to be one. It appeared out of nowhere and came with baggage. At least to me. But now it seems that everyone is a coach, and each one has a different flavor. Even those that focus on a very specific task are coaches. Words You know I like me them words. We are bombarded with industry buzzwords (see this episode). The right word can make all the difference in the world for a reader or a potential client. I want to give some food for ..read more

Three words There are a number of words that can cause an emotional reaction. I won’t use the word ‘trigger’ because that’s overused. We’re not going to go over all of those words, but we’re going to do three of them: fault, responsibility, and ownership—and we’re going to explore the positives of those words. There’s a positive version of fault?! A new book In an upcoming book one of the chapters explores the fact that we are told time and time again to take responsibility for things, and to accept a fault, and in (almost) every case, it is a negative thing. However, you’re never told to tak ..read more

Google Gemini Gemini is Google’s version of ChatGPT. It’s a large language model (LLM) that thinks and responds naturally. You can have conversations, ask for advice, ask it to play a part, and even ask it to generate images. That’s where my journey began. I asked it to generate a few images. This led to a discussion about Bias. Bias You see, Gemini’s handlers have you covered on bias, because they decided to remove all of it. The problem? They have their own bias. Let’s talk about just how dangerous that is, and how it affects you, and why “removing all bias” is a lofty, impossible, and poten ..read more

Down days It’s normal for people to have down days, to have times in which they become less than motivated. it’s also normal to find yourself without purpose here and there. Sure, you have a purpose—you have good old Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to keep you going. Are ya hungry? In pain? Do you need to make money? Do you need a hug today (the answer is always yes). But there are moments in which we lack a bit of motivation. Even people who are explicitly, painfully, blindly aware of motivation, productivity, the way things work, still have those moments. Yes, I’m talking about me. Mark Bradford ..read more

Did I catch you in time? Every year I tell you not to make resolutions—not because I don’t want you to set goals, but because resolutions (at least the style of setting goals) traditionally have a fantastic failure rate. So, before you make them (or if you’ve made them, before you try to execute them) listen to this, and it may be what actually allows you to make it happen. In fact, I’m sure of it. Three types of resolutions, a different kind of goal, and Did you know there are three? There are. Let’s talk about it. A new book I have a new book scheduled for 2024 that goes into depth on some o ..read more

AI & ChatGPT* A language model uses a special kind of learning to conduct a ‘probability distribution’ over words used to predict the most likely next word in a sentence based on the previous entry. Language models learn from text and can be used for producing original responses (both short and very long), predicting the next word in a text, speech recognition, optical character recognition and handwriting recognition. That description is mostly meaningless to the average person. When the average person uses it they announce a different description –“Oh, it’s a chatbot! This one is smart ..read more

There are a lot of lists out there for how to obtain happiness, productivity, etc. As you know Alchemy for Life™ is exactly about that too. So, I’d like to not only share some of these principals, but tell you about my real world experience with them as well as what you will encounter by utilizing them. In other words, what the reality is of these things. Ikigai The first is a big one, called Ikigai (pronounced EE-KEY-GUY). I stumbled on this a few years ago. It is the intersection of What you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at and what you can be paid for. Check out the VENN dia ..read more

“There’s no wrong way to do it…” Have you ever been given that advice? Did it make sense to you? Did it set you at ease? No, me neither. Let me tell you why that is the worst advice you can give someone who is trying to improve their craft, and why you NEVER hear it from anyone who is accomplished at what they do. Let’s talk about creatives, getting better at what you do, and the absurdity of running over people every time you get in your car. The post There’s no wrong way… first appeared on Alchemy For Life ..read more