Phil Fragasso's Blog: Blogs, Insights & Rants, page 2

One could make a strong argument that the three scariest words to state aloud (particularly in the workplace) are these: I don’t know. That phrase is an explicit admission that we’re less than perfect. Our fear of stating “I don’t know” is amplified by the worries that we should know it, perhaps we once knew it but have since forgotten, and that everyone else knows it.

There are two alternative approaches to saying “I don’t know.” The first is to remain silent. You might look away and hide yo...

Donald Trump’s non-apology regarding his newest and most crass comments about women provides a pitch-perfect affirmation of this excerpt from 20/20 Mind Sight .

Even the most honest and dependable of us will occasionally make mistakes and do or say something we wish we could take back. Those moments often cause feelings of fear and humiliation and constitute a critical inflection point where the rubber of trustworthiness hits the road in earnest. That inflection point relates to a longstandin...

In 1943, Abraham Maslow introduced the psychology of human potential to a broad audience via his “hierarchy of needs” pyramid. Seventy years later it is still taught in high schools and colleges despite widespread criticism of Maslow’s data-collection processes, suspect assumptions, and highly subjective interpretations.

I’ve never been a fan of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I don’t like its sequential, step-by-step approach to personal motivation, growth, and achievement. Life is anything but...

Do you know the most commonly asked question at job interviews? It’s this: Name your greatest weakness.

And the most common response to that question? I’m a perfectionist.

The question is bogus and the response is cloyingly absurd. In defense of the interviewee, he or she is simply trying to turn a negative into a positive; but only the truly deluded could view perfectionism as a positive attribute. Perfection is illusory and its pursuit will inevitably lead to grief and disappointment. If yo...

When I first started writing (way back before most of you were born), I worked at a manual typewriter. My fingers would tap the keys and every 10-12 words I’d slap the carriage return to slide over, advance the paper, and drop down to the next line. Mistakes required White-Out applied with a tiny brush or retyping the entire page.

When I was in my early twenties, I upgraded to a Smith-Corona electric model. At the time, it was a significant investment of money and affirmed to me that I was se...

The American philosopher William James often argued that human beings were blind “to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.” It is this blindness that, if left unchecked, can progress from a simple preference for similar-looking/same-thinking people to ideological fanaticism.

Everyone is prejudiced to some degree. We may suppress those feelings from being outwardly expressed, or we may deny them even to ourselves. The key to keeping biases to a minimum is to turn off t...

As the Republican and Democratic conventions approach, some things are certain. We’ll hear a lot of soaring rhetoric and teeth-gnashing. We’ll see more pomp than a Kardashian Instagram feed. And we’ll be fed a steady stream of hyperbole, cherry-picked factoids, and outright lies. Mark Twain famously observed that politicians would never lie “unless it was absolutely convenient;” and the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen told us, “Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.” (...