My categories page on Sources of Insight is really a Personal Development Hub (if you think in terms of a Hub and Spoke model.)   It’s a one-stop shop for all the categories I use on Sources of Insight.   Many of you I know, focus on continuous improvement and are life-long learners, so you’ll appreciate this.

(BTW, be sure to subscribe to Sources of Insight.   I’m going to be tackling some key challenges in today’s world including, making a living in the new economy.  I’m going to share patterns and practices, as well as stories and case studies of people that make $1,000 a day online, doing what they love as info-preneurs.   Way too many people are struggling in the “jobless” economic recovery, and I want to give you the edge and real skills you can use to change your game, or help somebody you know.  I can’t promise an easy path, but I can save you some dead-ends, and wasted time and effort, and share some of the short-cuts and methods that actually work)

Maps Help You Find Your Way Around
I always think it’s easier to find your way around when you have a map.  A friend suggested I create descriptions for my categories to help both humans and search engines figure out what my categories are all about.  If nothing else, it would be a great map making exercise.

Today, I added descriptions to the categories, so that you can see the intent behind the various buckets, and I included some samples where it made sense.  When I was done writing the descriptions, which turned out to be a two-hour exercise, that I originally thought would be a twenty minute exercise -- it revealed a lot.  It revealed a better map of Sources of Insight, going well-beyond just a list of categories and links.  It forced me to re-think and rationalize why I chose the various categories that I did, and revaluate whether they are still the right ones.

While there’s more time ahead of Sources of Insight, than behind it … it was good to take a look at the map, which was like taking a look from the balcony, or taking a look from the mountain top.  It was easier for me to see where I have a lot more work to do, and where I haven’t done enough to equip you with the right tools and skills for the tough stuff at work, or the challenges in life.  I also noticed where some information is a bit too buried and needs to be surfaced and cross-linked in a better way.

The Sources of Insight “Treasure Map” at Your Disposal
I’ve created brief descriptions to help you understand the thinking behind each category I use on Sources of Insight.  Here is a map to help you find your way around Sources of Insight and to know where to look for key personal development resources at your finger tips:

• Body – Body is anything related to shaping your body or improving your physical prowess.
• Book Nuggets – “Book Nuggets” are key insights and actions from books.  When I read a book, I look for the actionable or insight parts, and then write about how to turn the insight into action.  I also share any relevant personal experience of applying the idea.
• Business – Business is anything related to business skills, business strategy, etc.  Where possible, I try to show how business skills can be applied to life to improve your personal effectiveness.
• Career – Career is anything related to finding jobs, thinking through career paths, making a living, etc.  I also try to work in cornerstone concepts like work-life balance, living your values, and driving from your life style.  The goal of my career posts is to empower you to be YOUR best, while growing on the job, doing work that makes your soul sing, and playing to your strengths.  I think of it as giving you skills to pay the bills and lead a better life.
• Communication – Communication is anything related to communicating, whether that’s writing, or creating presentations, or speaking.  I’m a fan of continuously improving skills to write, speak, and share ideas visually, in a more effective way.
• Confidence – Confidence is anything related to improving your self-confidence.  Confidence is one of the most important attributes for making the most of what you’ve got, and for living life to the fullest.  To improve confidence, I find patterns and practices based on both science and real-world experience.
• Conflict – Conflict is anything related to interpersonal conflict, negotiations, and arguments.  With these posts, I equip you with skills to be more effective in identifying, addressing, and resolving conflict.  Conflict is a common part of every day life, and by improving your skills and coping mechanisms, you can turn conflict from a painful experience to something you look forward to as a way to challenge yourself to be more collaborative, create more effective solutions, and improve the greater good.  On the flip side, you can grow your skills to avoid getting stepped on or taken advantage of, and be more assertive.
• Creativity – Creativity is anything related to improving your creativity, ideas, and ability to find creative solutions.  I treat creativity as an art and science, and I regularly explore techniques and methods for improving creativity.  There are many books with great ideas for improving your creativity, so what I do is find, organize, and share the best of the best that I can find.  I also try to put the insights into plain English, as well as make the skills easier to turn into action.
• Decision-Making – Decision making is anything related to making decisions.  Your ability to make decisions and choose wisely is a way to express judgment.  Peter Drucker was a fan of judgment as skill, but something you very much learn from experience.  I focus on both personal decisions, as well as decisions in the workplace, including making team-based decisions.  While, I share decision frameworks and methods, I keep them simple and pragmatic.  The true keys to effective decision making are knowing the criteria, limiting the options, setting boundaries, and satisficing where you can.  One of the best skills you can grow through life is decisive action.
• Effectiveness – Effectiveness is anything related to improving your personal effectiveness.  I like to think of effectiveness, the same way Covey thinks about success: “The response meets the challenge.”  One of the best questions you can ask yourself is, “Is it effective?”  I make it a point to find the best principles, patterns, and practices for improving your thinking, feeling, and taking action.  My posts on personal effectiveness and some of my most popular posts.  After all, who doesn’t want to improve their personal effectiveness.
• Emotional-Intelligence – Emotional intelligence is anything related to improving your emotional intelligence skills.  You can think of emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive, evaluate, and control emotions.   It’s one of the most useful skills to help you think better and make better choices, by using emotions as input.  It’s also especially important as a leader to help you improve your empathy and build rapport.  By improving your emotional intelligence, you can use your rational-mind to make better choices, and either avoid going into ‘fight or flight” mode, or break yourself out of it, faster and easier.
• Fear – Fear is anything related to dealing with fear.  Fear can hold you back in so many ways.  Whether your fear is based on real or perceived threats, the problem is when it cripples you from taking action.  To bring out your best, conquer your fears, and live life to the fullest, I share key strategies and tactics for dealing with fear.
• Featured – Featured is anything that gets featured on the Home page.
• Finance – Finance is anything related to making money, investing, building wealth, the economy, and personal finance. 
• Fun – Fun is anything related to having fun, finding the lighter side, or sharing humor.
• Getting-Results – Getting Results is anything related to my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.  Getting Results the Agile Way is a personal results system for work and life.  The book is a playbook for making things happen at work and in life.  In the book I share key principles, patterns, and practices for goals, motivation, time management,  personal effective, productivity, etc.  It’s all about making the most of what you’ve got, and it draws from software, positive psychology, project management, etc.  It puts science and proven practices on your side, and helps you bridge the gap between the “state of the art” and the “state of the practice.”
• Goals – Goals is anything related to setting and achieving your goals.  While I do share classic methods and techniques for goal setting, I do put special emphasis on finding goals that inspire you and connect to your “why” in life.  I’m a fan of meaningful results and inspired action.  As Tony Robbins says, “ People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals.”
• Guest Posts – Guest Posts is any post by a featured guest.  While I tend to focus on guest posts by best-selling authors, I really open the door to anybody who has a super skill to share with the world.   I especially enjoy sharing insightful authors, and people with expertise or interesting experience that helps people grow their skills to pay the bills or lead a better life.  That’s a common theme.
• Happiness – Happiness is anything related to improving your happiness.  With these posts, I help you avoid the “If-then” trap of always putting happiness somewhere into the future, and instead grow it right under your feet.   There is a lot of science on happiness that you can use everyday.  For example,Stumbling on Happiness teaches us that we aren’t very good at predicting our own happiness.  We also know that happiness can be measured in two ways: 1) How happy are you? and 2) How happy are you with your life?  One focuses on how you feel in the moment, while the other focuses on fulfillment.  We also know that people have different temperaments and levels of happiness, and that you can work against your own happiness by expecting yourself to feel happy all the time or by having a low-frustration tolerance.  By building your happiness skills, you can choose happiness, and you can improve your enjoyment along the way, as you embark on your personal pursuit of happiness.
• Health – Health is anything related to improving your health.  Your body is your temple, and hopefully we can make it last for the long haul.  As the joke goes, we spend our younger years trading our health for wealth, and then our later years we trade our wealth for our health.  Hopefully, with the right patterns and practices, we can get the best of both worlds.
• Influence – Influence is anything related to improving your influence or understanding the impact of influence on you.  My dictionary defines influence as, “The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself”, and that sounds reasonable to me.  To make it real, think of it as the ability for you to shape behaviors and change.  You can shape yourself, others, teams, organizations, etc.  In fact, influence is one of the most important skills in today’s world.  You can do it all, so your influence is how you can get it done through other people.  One of the specific skills I write about is influence without authority, which is a common scenario, where you need to influence people that don’t report to you.
• Innovation – Innovation is anything related to the art and science of innovation.   Innovation is derived from the Latin word innovatus, which is the noun form of innovare, which means, "to renew or change.”  I’m a fan of innovation as a way to experiment and learn, and change the game on multiple levels.  I’ve tested multiple ways to innovate under extreme conditions, and one of my strengths is bringing ideas to life, and making things happen.  It’s been a long and winding road, but I think the road gets easier when you know the key patterns and practices that work.  I also share key ideas and wisdom on innovation from several leading thinkers including Peter Drucker, Edward de Bono, and Michael Michalko, who is a former Disney imagineer and author of the book, ThinkerToys.
• Intellectual-Horsepower – Intellectual Horsepower is anything related to thinking and improving your mind.  I treat thinking as a skill and I focus on finding methods and techniques you can use to improve your thinking.  One of the best ways you can improve your thinking is by asking better questions.  I regularly share powerful questions you can use to improve your work and life.  For example, here is my post on, 101 Questions that Empower You, which is one of my most popular posts of all time.
• Interpersonal-Skills – Interpersonal Skills is anything related to interacting with other people.  This is all about building the “people skills”  Whether it’s dealing with people you can’t stand, or building rapport, having crucial conversations, dealing with conflict, or influencing without authority  (Crucial Conversations, Dealing with People You Can’t Stand,  and Influence without Authority are great books, BTW).
• Leadership – Leadership is anything related to leadership.  John Maxwell says it precisely, “leadership is influence”, and I think that’s true.   I’m a fan of distinguishing thought-leadership from people-leadership.  Although they are related, there is power in understanding your strength as a leader, as well as your passion, and how to use this insight to shape your journey and career path.  I think it also helps to think of leadership as a progression, from self-leadership to leading teams, to leading organizations, etc.  As you grow your capability, you expand your sphere of influence, and you can think globally, but act locally.  Another important concept in leadership is the idea of “servant leadership” and doing things for the greater good, which can be a sharp contrast from an authority-based or command-and-control leadership style, which works well in some specific contexts and environments, but not in many or most others.
• Learning – Learning is anything related to learning.  I’m a fan of continuous improvement and I’m a life-long learner.  That said, I also believe that learning is a by-product of chasing your passion, and diving deep into what you love.  I also think learning is a skill we can use every day to deal with setbacks, fail fast, find the way forward, and carry forward the lessons learned.  In the age of information, learning is one of the super skills to have under your belt.   In my posts, I share techniques you can use to learn faster, simpler, and better, so that you spend less time down dead-ends, and more time figuring out what’s important and using what you know.  Learning and thinking skills go hand in hand, as well as reading skills.
• Lessons-Learned – Lessons Learned is anything related to sharing lessons from work and life.  Many of my lessons learned posts summarize key patterns and practices from inspiring people.  For example, two of my most popular posts in this category are Lessons Learned from Bruce Lee and Lessons Learned from Seth Godin.   In each case, I think of it as “greatness distilled” as I attempt to share and scale their best insights and actions for work and life.  I use their quotes, books, and anything else that might be useful as a way to reverse-engineer their thought patterns and principles that we can use to expand our abilities and gain perspectives.
• Life – Life is anything related to the topic of life.  It’s a broad bucket but that’s the beauty.  If there’s one thing we all share in common it’s the human experience, and this little journey we call life.  As each of us finds our way in the world, my hope is that we get better at living life, and making the journey the destination.  The key is that life is not a face, and the trick is to figure out who you want to be and what experiences you want to create … and embracing the ups and downs along the way.  I’ve found that life gets better with the right words, which is why I share a lot of quotes.  I’ve also found that life gets better with skills, and that we can improve our life by applying business skills, project management skills, and other skills that we tend to just use at work.  I’m also a big believer in driving a path of fulfillment and making meaning.   One of the people I know that’s very effective at this is Dr. K (Richard Kirschner), and he wrote a guest post for me on just this topic.  It’s How To Design a Fulfilling Life.  It’s a real gem.
• Management – Management is anything related to management.  Peter Drucker teaches us that,“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”   In this category, I tend to put posts about managing the innovation, managing the business, and managing people. 
• Marketing – Marketing is anything related to marketing.  In this topic, I focus on things like branding, positioning, market sizing, market evaluation, strategic marketing, and value propositions.
• Motivation –  Motivation is anything to do with motivation.  I’m a fan of inspired action, and I write a lot of posts about how to make the most of your motivation.  All motivation is really self-motivation, and the key is to know how to push your own buttons.  I think it’s also important to understand the difference between motivation, drivers, wants, needs, self-discipline, and other concepts that help you know how to find your mojo.  At the end of the day, your most powerful tool for motivation is self-awareness and knowing yourself.  To fill your motivation bag of tricks, I include many skills, principles, and patterns for motivation, as well as inspiring people, inspirational quotes, and meaningful metaphors to help you get your groove on.
• Movies – Movies is anything related to movies.  I watch a lot of movies, and it’s where I get some of my best insights.
• NLP – NLP is anything related to Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  NLP is a set of principles, patterns, and practices to program your mind, body, and emotions to think, act, and feel your best.  Many executives, use NLP as a way to change their game.  The beauty is NLP is available to anybody who wants to use its methods and techniques, and there are many books on the topic.  My favorite book on NLP, is the book, Brilliant NLP: What the Most Successful People Know, Say, and Do.  I like this particular book because it’s simple to read and it focuses on the big ideas and keeps things both insightful and actionable.
• People – People is anything related to people.  I use this category to make it easy to browse my posts about key people, some of which are personal heroes, and others are mentors or role models, or simply people I find insightful or inspiring.
• Personal-Development – Personal Development is anything related to personal development.   I don’t really focus on the “self-help” niche of personal development.  Instead, I focus on the idea of continuous improvement and expanding your personal capabilities.  Basically, bringing out your best and making the most of what you’ve got.  I spend a lot of energy on creating, finding, sharing, and organizing techniques to be YOUR best.  One of my most important personal development guides is my free eBook, You 2.0.   Many people have shared their stories with me how this simple and short guide helped them build a firm foundation and unleash a better version of themselves, and get back on path, while the world changes under their feet.
• Problem-Solving – Problem Solving is anything related to solving problems.  In this category, I share skills and techniques that help you make mince-meat out of your problems.  No matter what the problem is there are some key ways to improve your ability to solve them.  Some of the keys include reframing problems as challenges, clarifying the problem, modeling the solution by finding examples to learn from, asking better questions, and testing your solutions, and testing your assumptions.   One of my favorite quotes on solving problems is by Voltaire, “No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.”  I find that’s true, and the real key is writing your problem down in a way that you can share it, and others can team up with you … because no problem can withstand the assault of collective thinking.
• Productivity – Productivity is anything related to personal productivity or getting things done.  Personally, I’m not a fan of output or productivity for productivity’s sake.  That’s why I was very specific in one of the taglines for Getting Results the Agile Way … it’s “a simple system for meaningful results.”    I’m a fan of slowing down to speed up.  I’m also a fan of having compelling outcomes, and clarity of the end in mind.  If the *why* isn’t strong enough, then why do it.  At the end of the day, I believe the key to productivity, where you are both efficient and effective, is working on the right things, at the right time, with the right energy, the right way.  If you are a fan of making things happen, I think you’ll enjoy one of my posts from this category – Rituals for Results.  In the post, I share some of my favorite habits and practices for getting results.
• Quotes – Quotes is anything related to quotes.  I have a lot of quotes, and I’m an avid collector.  I’m a big believer that quotes are one of the best ways to hare the wisdom of the ages and modern day sages.  You can browse my collection of Great Quotes.   I have a large garden of quotes you can waltz through so if you only choose to read one set, read my Inspirational Quotes.   If you’re having a bad day, chances are, these quotes will give you a new lease on life, or at least a fighting chance.
• Relationships – Relationships is anything related to building, healing, or dealing with relationships.  While interpersonal skill is more focus simply on “people skills”,  Relationships is more focused on the relationships aspect of people in your life, including friends, colleagues, family, and love interests or loved ones. 
• Strengths – Strengths is anything related to character strengths and talents.  I think of strengths as your natural thinking, feeling, and doing patterns, not necessarily what you are good at (since you can get good at things, but they go against your grain.)  I’m a fan of playing to strengths, while reducing liabilities.  I’m also a fan of spending way more time in your strengths than in weaknesses, and using your strengths as your force multiplier.  I’ve found this is the key to sustainable energy and amplifying your impact.  It’s also a way to differentiate in a Darwin world, and either compete more effectively, or better yet, stand out so uniquely that there is no competition … and unleash your unique combination of strengths, talents, skills, and experience to the world.  The challenge with finding your strengths is having a vocabulary to frame and label them, but lucky for you, there is a lot of research and books on just this topic.  In my post, The Language of Personal Strengths, you can explore some of the labels people use to identify, classify, and share their strengths.
• Stress – Stress is anything related to stress.  Stress and anxiety are related but often confused.  I find skills, techniques, and coping mechanisms to help you Use Stress to Be Your Best.    Here are the keys:  If you can distinguish between stress and anxiety, and if you can master the relaxation response, and you can develop your emotional intelligence, then you can do wonders for stress management.  By default, “fight or flight” is easy, and it’s what gets us into trouble.  Learning how to deal with stress and use it to get our game on takes skill, but it’s worth the extra effort and it’s something you can use on a daily basis (unless you just happened to find that magical place where the unicorns run free and the rainbows shine bright, and the sun is always smiling.)
• Time-Management – Time Management is anything related to managing your time.  Some way time is all you’ve got and it’s your most precious resource.  One of the most important questions you can answer in this life is, “What do you want to spend your time on?”, or “What do you want to spend more time doing?”    There are a lot of tricks to time management including managing energy, not time, and finding your flow.  There are basics to master, like prioritizing what’s important, making time for things, and actually scheduling things you want to have time for.  One of the most fundamental rules to know is Parkinson’s Law, which teaches us that “time expands to fill its container.”  One of your best weapons against time bandits in your bag of time management tricks is timeboxing.   Just that one method can help you suddenly find time for the things you’ve wanted, and help you keep your energy strong.
• Values – Value is anything related to values.  One of the best ways you can live the good life is to spend more time in your values.  You can also use your values as a compass as you navigate your way through life.  You can also use your values as a way to motivate yourself, by connecting everything you do, back to your values.   For example, I value adventure.  So at work, I don’t do projects … I lead epic adventures.  The difference might seem small, but it’s powerful when every job I take on is a chance to make impact and make the journey an adventure the team can look back on and be proud of, while enjoying the journey, challenges and all, along the way.  Of course, the trick to living your values is you have to know what they are.  I have a post on Finding Your Values, but I’m going to have to elaborate on this topic more, because there are a lot of nuances to finding your values that matter the most.  The challenge, of course with values, is that they all seem “valuable”, so the trick is finding the vital few.
• Videos – Videos is anything related to videos.  I share videos I find that are insightful, and I do plan to create videos too.
• Writing – Writing is anything related to writing.  Writing is a skill you can use in so many ways whether at work or in life.  One of my favorite ways to think is to “think on paper.”  I also use writing as a way to share and scale expertise.  A big part of my life has been about writing guides to change the world, and my strength is writing prescriptive guidance.  I share what I learn, but I also share the wisdom and insight from others to help you write with might and improve your writing skills.

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