Things You Should Not Do Everyday

• Check your phone while talking to someone. Stop checking your phone. It doesn’t notice when you aren’t paying attention. But people notice. And they care.

• Multitask during a meeting. The easiest way to be the smartest person in the room is to be the person who pays the most attention to the room.

• Think about people who don’t make any difference in your life. Don’t spend time and energy thinking or worrying about who have no impact on your life — from who cut in line to TV reality show cast members. Your family, your friends, your employees — all the people that really matter to you — deserve something deeper and more important.

• Let the past dictate the future. Mistakes are valuable. Learn from them. Then let them go.

• Wait until you’re sure you will succeed. You can never feel sure you will succeed at something new, but you can always feel sure you are committed to giving something your best. And you can always feel sure you will try again if you fail. Stop waiting. You have a lot less to lose than you think, and everything to gain.

• Talk behind someone’s back. If you’ve talked to more than one person about something Joe is doing, wouldn’t everyone be better off if you stepped up and actually talked to Joe about it? And if it’s “not your place” to talk to Joe, it’s probably not your place to talk about Joe.

• Say “yes” when I really mean “no.” Refusing a request from colleagues, customers, or even friends is really hard. But rarely does saying no go as badly as you expect. Most people will understand, and if they don’t, should you care too much about what they think?