Simplify

PLUS: A single act

May 27, 2025

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s email:

  • Be careful who you let near your head

  • Validation

  • Simplify

  • A single act

  • Amelia Earhart’s career wisdom

ON YOUR CAREER

Be careful who you let near your head

Some words stay with us. Michael Cavanagh, my former psychology professor, said, “be careful who you let near your head.” He cautioned us about receiving and providing bad advice. Many people suffer setbacks in their careers and relationships because they follow advice that was wrong for them.

4 tips to help avoid bad advice:

  1. Listen to people whose values align with your goals

  2. Recognize everyone has biases that may influence their advice

  3. Seek advice from people with relevant expertise and experience

  4. Use advice as an input but use your own critical thinking

COMMUNICATION

Caroline Fleck’s Validation

Dr Caroline Fleck’s Validation (2025) explores how to influence and connect with people. Here are 3 things we derived:

  1. Validation is not praise, problem-solving, or agreement. Validation is accepting another’s feelings and beliefs as real and understandable. Even if we don’t agree or approve.

  2. Validation is a universal human need. Regardless of background, we crave acceptance and acknowledgment. Validation fosters trust, emotional safety, and stronger relationships.

  3. Validation creates conditions for people to be receptive to feedback. People are more open to change and growth when they feel understood.

All emotions are valid. Trust me, you don’t want to get in the business of arguing with people about how they feel.

— Caroline Fleck
PRODUCTIVITY

Simplify

Simplification involves:

  • Breaking complex tasks into more manageable components

  • Automating repetitive tasks

  • Removing unnecessary steps

  • And clarifying roles

Simplification improves our productivity.

What weekly tasks could you and your team simplify?

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

— Martin H. Fischer
1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS

A single act

Giving and receiving kindness makes us happier. A single kind act can initiate a positive feedback loop. Imagine a workplace with hundreds of positive loops rippling across it.

No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.

— Amelia Earhart
CAREER WISDOM

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart (1897 to 1937) disappeared in the Pacific Ocean while attempting to fly around the world. She served as a nurse’s aide during World War I. After the war, she briefly studied pre-med at Columbia University before joining her family in California. Earhart took her first airplane ride in 1920 which sparked her passion for flying.

Earhart became a celebrated aviator. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. Earhart was also an author, career counselor, and clothing designer. Some of her career wisdom:

The best way to do it is to do it.

There is more to life than being a passenger.

Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done.