If you are excited about something, jealous of someone or have a desire to say no so that you can say yes to something else, ask yourself: “How you are standing in your own way?” I’m out on my own running collaborative design sprints for clients to solve problems and come up with new ideas for products, services or experiences in the world.

If you don’t decide to try new things, you stay where you are today. This may be safe for a period of time but not forever. Change is necessary. To change, you must decide, commit and act on that.

To stay relevant in today’s rapidly changing marketplace you must change. ‘Adapt or die’ in evolutionary terms. If you stay the same or move too slow, you put your business at risk of not being here in the future.

Language is a tool people use every day but words can fail us. Drawing feels uncomfortable and intimidating to many of us. But even the worst (and I’d argue that there is no bad drawing — the only bad drawings are the ones that aren’t drawn.) Drawing communicates volumes compared to a sentence.

When I facilitate Design Sprints, physical movement is a part of the equation. We get up and move around the room. We stand and gather round for sharing ideas. We go out into the world to observe the environments that people live and work in. Motion creates a noticeable shift and more ideas come forth than they do when a group is sitting still around a table.

Every time we have an interaction with another person we are creating a unique exchange that lives outside of the space that those individuals inhabit. When we have a choice about who we create with (meaning, they aren’t our blood relatives) we choose the people who provide us something good; something that makes our life more pleasurable or easier than it would be without the exchange.

When you launch and observe how people interact with your product you can continuously make changes. The user responses will be influenced by what they want, need and expect. What they want, need and expect is influenced by the other things they interact with every day. With every beautifully designed experience that someone has, their expectations are elevated.

As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.” That’s a powerful idea, and it’s one any inventor or creative person needs pushing them onward. There are risks, however, to blindly thinking you can do something and proceeding into dangerous territory. On the other side, there is risk in thinking you can’t do something and limiting possibility before you’ve even begun.

Time spent in nature gives me confidence that patterns will emerge from even the toughest problems — and beautiful things will grow from the mud.

Have you ever been in a meeting with a bunch of people and felt like everyone is holding back? You hear people making statements, but the statements have no soul. Their bodies are in the room, but they are not authentically present. As a result, you end up with a bunch of stale, careful statements about what someone thinks someone else wants to hear. Here are a few tips to avoid these scenarios and be your most authentic self at work.

A meditation on sameness, snowflakes & nothingness. I went this weekend to a place in the woods called Pacem in Terris. One hour north of the city of Minneapolis. This is a place where you can spend time in solitude. Uninterrupted. For as long as you like. I thought just under 2 days would be about right for me this time.

We bought a cheap short-sale home, spent years renovating it, and ultimately used the sale to clear our student debt. Here’s what the journey really looked like.