Competition in business isn’t always the best way to encourage individual or team excellence, let alone the only one. Management myths like this contain an element of truth, somewhere, and only become dangerous when they’re treated as self-evident.

Sometimes you have to go against your instincts to pursue actions or behaviors that don’t feel “normal.” Yet doing so can lead to expedited results, improved outcomes, and more cost-effective solutions, says Nina Simosko.

People generally dislike uncertainty and there’s so much uncertainty around at the moment it’s hard not to drown in it. Here’s how to cope better, plus some ideas for simple actions that will always transform your day and move you from cowering victim into courageous captain of your destiny.

John Fletcher muses on the true value of a job, and why losing consciousness of yourself and of your ego in your single-minded application to the task in hand counts for more than you may imagine in making any job worthwhile.

Do you consider yourself successful? Peter Vajda meditates on what it means to be a success and how different definitions of the word work in good times and bad. For him there’s success and there’s success: the one based on external factors and subject to constant insecurity; the other internal and far more resistant to bad times.

Carmine Coyote tells a story to prove that you don’t need a life plan. You don’t need motivation, self-confidence, peer support or even luck. All you need is the willingness to take the next most obvious step—then repeat the process again and again, regardless of how you feel.

The trick to living through tough times is to focus on the essentials. If you want to make progress, you must be very clear and specific about what that means. In easy times, you can afford to be vague. Not now. To protect what matters most means abandoning the rest. If you don’t, all that useless baggage will drag you down.

Parting words from a successful Hedge Fund manager 
In case you missed this article (“Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F—- You”) on portfolio.com on October 17th, here are the parting words from Andrew Lahde, the manager of a small hedge fund, who grabbed the spotlight last year after his one-year-old fund returned 866 percent betting against [...]

When things go wrong like this, we tend either to get mad or become depressed. And because we live in a ‘can do’ society, far more people get mad. The trouble with blaming ‘them’—whoever ‘they’ are—is that you are placing the problem ‘out there’ where you have no direct control and probably little influence. While you dissipate your energy in resentful complaints and self-righteous demands, ‘they’ are untouched.

A risk is always a risk. A big one is riskier than a small one. Acknowledge that and you’re at least forewarned that your strategy may well go wrong. Pretend you’ve found a way to make it a near certainty and you’ll probably bet the farm on it—then have to run to the tax-payer to bail you out.