Articles by David Skidmore

What does it take to be excellent? According to Trevor Moawad, it takes what it takes. Until his passing in the fall of 2021, Moawad was the mental conditioning coach for NFL quarterback Russell Wilson, and he wrote this manifesto for those desiring real growth and change.

Have you ever had a project due, yet your brain was tangled in distractions? I don’t need to bore you with social media and technology statistics for us to agree we live in a “distraction-rich world.” Unfortunately, those distractions often hold us back from meaningful, impactful work.

When I saw this book at a famous bookstore one Sunday afternoon, my first response was to mutter, “Impossible.” However, after feeling the buzz of a few more notifications on my phone, I was intrigued. Newport’s work in “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism” had already profoundly impacted my life. The best part is that Newport doesn’t just throw opinions into the wind. He is an engineer, and his writing is evidence-based. 

Change is happening all around us. You can see the shift in the leaves, temperature, and even when the sun sets. We are reminded, as Solomon wrote, “there is a time to be born and a time to die.” We spend a lot of our time avoiding endings. We don’t want to end things. Sometimes we avoid them, procrastinate, or take another path. There’s a reason so many relationships end with, “I thought things were going great, and then they ghosted me.”

How do I find my passion? This question has driven people for years, and this book is about that. However, the roadmap Cal Newport provides is not the expected path of the Western world. “Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, ‘so good that they can’t ignore you.'” The book revolves around this quote from Newport. Instead of trying to find your passion, you give yourself to the never-ending growth process.

A lot of content is built around inspiring you to start something. The challenge is that we often don’t know when to quit. The best time to quit something destined to be unsuccessful is before you begin. This little book is all about determining what to launch and what to stop.

“What if this could be easy?” When I read that line, I realized Greg McKeown was writing to an audience I was not part of. After all, “What if this could be easy?” isn’t a viable question for the work I am doing. Still, his book Essentialism had impacted me as I shared here, so I trudged forward through my unbelief as I continued to read Effortless, Then I ran face-first into this question he penned: “What is the simplest way to achieve this result?”

Sometimes, life can feel out of control. More specifically, sometimes, leaders feel out of control of their business and the culture. Dr. Henry Cloud shares a story early on of a leader struggling with this kind of culture. When Dr. Cloud asked him to describe the culture he would like to have, he began to describe the kind of place many people would love to work. When Dr. Cloud asked him why not create that kind of culture, the leader had a breakthrough moment. He said, “You know, when you think about it … I am ridiculously in charge.”

When you look at the cover of Essentialism, you see a picture of scribbles with an arrow pointed toward the word “essentialism” surrounded by scribbled circles. I like this picture because even when life moves away from being chaotically overwhelmed by messiness, the circles are rarely perfect mapping around our lives. That’s what the disciplined pursuit of “less but better” is about. Life is messy enough as is. What if we dedicate ourselves to achieving more by focusing simply on what is essential? As Greg McKeown says, “It isn’t about getting more things done; it’s about getting the right things done.”

Tim S. Grover gives 13 rules for becoming unstoppable. The pathway is that of the book title, Relentless. The difference between Grover and most authors is every one of his rules begins with the “number 1.” The reason? Grover says numbering things 1 through 13, allows people to rank their level of importance, but to go from good to great to unstoppable, no rule is more important than another.