Welcome to Mindful Monday!

Here are some things I found useful this week...

Talked down with PJ Fleck for the podcast. We spent the first few minutes reliving one of the wildest games we played against each other in college.
Graham Duncan's piece on hiring excellent people holds up on a second read.
Edan Lepucki wrote something that made me laugh and think about my own kids.
Paul Graham on why thinking for yourself is so hard.
And Daniel Chambliss writing about excellence (it's mundane)

#674: PJ Fleck - Row The Boat, Nekton Mindset

When I was a junior in college, I played quarterback for the Ohio Bobcats. We traveled up to DeKalb, IL, to play against the undefeated Northern Illinois Huskies. We eventually lost in overtime, and their star wide receiver had 14 catches for 234 yards and the game-tying touchdown (that sent the game to Overtime). That receiver was PJ Fleck. PJ is now the head football coach at Minnesota. He's had a meteoric rise in the profession. It was a ton of fun to record this one with him. I did alongside the coaches I work with (you'll hear Geron Stokes and the HOFer Sherri Coale on this episode). Some of the topics we covered: Building an Elite Culture, Nekton Mindset, Selecting > Recruiting, Intrinsic Motivation, Row The Boat, and Transformational Coaching. You can also WATCH this conversation on YouTube.

What's Going On Here... With This Human?

One of the essays I keep coming back to... It can be useful, when interviewing someone, to ask explicitly: What’s going on here with this person in front of me? The more I’ve done it, the more I realize that what most people think of as the hard parts of hiring—asking just the right question that catches the candidate off guard, defining the role correctly, assessing the person’s skills—are less important than a more basic task: how do you see someone, including yourself, clearly? CLICK HERE to read more.

Thoughts on Life, Parenting, and Writing

Novelist Edan Lepucki shared 45 thoughts on life, parenting, and writing. I think it's entertaining and useful. CLICK HERE to read it.

How To Think For Yourself

It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more. CLICK HERE to read more.

Wise Words

“Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.” -- Daniel F. Chambliss

Mindful Monday is a reader-supported publication. If it helped you, forward it to your friends. Thank you! -- Ryan