No matter what partnership it is - business, work, friendship, marriage - being on the same wave is beneficial ONLY when you are at the peak.

Waves drop - always!

And then you both (or all) are at the bottom. Is it healthy for your business or private partnerships? NO. Well it may be “fun” with lots of valuable experiences, lessons learned and sometimes unnecessary “bonding time”. Personally, I prefer better “team building” activities rather than crawling out of the bottoms towards new wave peaks :)

Yes, I see benefits of business partners being on the same wave, but I disagree to have that frame as a purpose where everyone wants to reach that point idealising its effect on success.

In order to scale up a business you have to have a business.

In order to scale up anything you do - you have to have some basis. Very few is ready to hear that, or accept it. Why? Because it gives a reality check: “before you get to shine bright like a superstar, you have to INVEST - money, time, effort, and all other resources you have and don’t have.”

You have to experiment and be creative, you have to fail, learn from mistakes and restart, and sometimes reshape everything or part of what you do.

Spoiler Alert for very unpopular opinion!

I have wondered why articles, memes or any kind of posts on topic “terrible leaders and their characteristics..” are so popular.? I mean, thousands of likes and hundreds of reposts are given to them in few hour time. Not the same result for rather educational posts purely on how to be a great leader and best leadership styles. And definitely less popularity or even none for posts and memes on topic “detect worst employee types”.

To name the price - either it be the price you ask for your services or product or the price you consider acceptable for the services and products you buy; either expected salary or the salary you are ready to pay for the position you recruit - it is YOUR responsibility.

We are so afraid to name the exact price we feel comfortable with, satisfied with, motivated by, that we create unnecessary drama around this topic. We could discuss the reasons why it is so, where comes the fear of rejection from and necessity at some point of our lives to put lower expectations. But this article is about consequences of being unable to name the price rather than the cause of this inability.

Being unable to name, negotiate, set the price you are motivated by and driven to provide services and sell products, work on projects, work with certain employer creates following drama:

Love this topic. Love. Love. Love. And the reason why I love it, is that Being Authentic is such a trendy movement right now, that on majority of cases it becomes 3F authenticity - Forced, Fake and Framed.

If you search on a web you will notice several rather similar definitions of the concept “be authentic”. Most common descriptions include: “be true to your own values, beliefs and personality”; “behave and act with congruence regardless of the pressure on you to act otherwise”. I would even like to shout out “BINGO” to wording “regardless of the pressure from others - be true to your personality and values”.

So far so good. But we are not living in a vacuum, so the pressure comes in the game.

And what we see is bunch of people (self-claimed authenticity Gurus) putting a pressure on others… to BE authentic. Funniest in this pressure is not about inviting people to stand up for their own values, to express themselves freely, but to tell people how they have to behave, think, talk and just be in order to call themselves authentic!!! What a hypocrisy!

In bias free world everyone would look at the information as it is -pure content regardless of wording, expressions and without attached emotional flaws and associations.

In reality we encounter full scale of judgments, misunderstandings and fights over who’s right and who’s wrong. And those fights, are they about the content said, heard or read or about apparent meaning that one has attached to it?

There are two very bold examples I have witnessed over the years in various occasion, which made be think a bit more about the topic.

Being a C-level person or a leader at a senior position may seem extremely glorious. And it is! To become the one is so attempting to many. Therefore professionals strive to reach that point in their careers. But.. the beauty of being the leader changes its intensity as soon as you realise that apart from all the shiny benefits “The Leader” status gives you, major pile of responsibilities you can’t share with anyone stands just next to you. You can’t ignore it, you can't delegate it and sometimes you can’t discuss it with anyone.