I think that beneficial behaviors can, like your body’s muscles, be strengthened through something I call the Prosperity Cycle. This cycle leverages the satisfaction that all of us experience when we achieve—or learn—something that we have worked hard to master. It is a reinforcing cycle that motivates us to navigate it again and again with bigger and bigger goals and corresponding results. The challenge, I believe, is in finding that first spark that motivates you to begin the process of striving and redefining failure as learning.

I’ve always been a sucker for great customer service. Amazon Prime gets my vote for great service without a human being involved, but Moosejaw is now setting the standard for service when I need to talk to someone about an order. Why does this matter? Because in a world where differentiation means life or death for an organization, I will go out of my way to do business with one that acts like it wants to help me.

“Oh, that’s easy,” one of them said. “We’re the women who don’t give a crap.”

Don’t give a crap about — ?

“What people expect us to do.”

“Or not do.”

When you are following your curiosity and exploring an idea or discipline that you are passionate about, it’s not work. It becomes effortless, inspired. You find yourself pushing past frontiers, until one day, you are so deep that there’s nobody else to turn to for answers.

a common set of habits that were exhibited by the most satisfied individuals. They tended to be people who enjoy learning and who had developed a high level of expertise within an area that they were passionate about. And whether they work in small or large organizations, they utilize an entrepreneur’s approach to their work. In other words, they aren’t satisfied by the status quo, bring a high level of energy to their work, and attract highly competent people to help them explore new ideas for better serving the markets they are passionate about.

The Prosperity Cycle is a self-reinforcing cycle that will set you on your chosen path, keep you moving forward, and provide you with the vast amount of energy that you’ll need to get where you want to go.

Technology may have eliminated many daily interactions that used to require face-to-face communication, but it has also had the unintended consequence of making the human interaction that remains all that more important. We are all social animals with a need to share, a need to be appreciated, and a desire to work with people who care about us.

People who have a personal vision have a twinkle in their eye and a spring in their step. They are living with a purpose and their daily progress toward their vision builds confidence and leads to a belief that anything is possible. And those people are just fun to be around. If you want to be an inspirational leader, start by developing your own personal vision and by making sure you are doing work and living life in a way that allows you to make progress toward it.

n the sporting or business world the mentor/mentee relationship is the definition of win/win. The mentor gets satisfaction and, in some cases, compensation—in the form of a return on a financial investment—and the mentee, through extension, gains the experience and confidence to achieve something they have never done before.

Opportunities are typically seen most clearly by those who have pursued their passion the furthest and for whom the opportunity seems to be glaringly obvious. Like the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book Outliers, when you have spent more time in a particular arena than anyone else, you have insights that others just don’t have.