Doron's Be You Effectively Podcast

The road to success is unique to each individual, but there are some shared commonalities to be had. Learning how others manage their time, set goals, and overcome obstacles is a great way to draw inspiration, stay motivated, and at the very least, normalize the universal challenges you’ll inevitably face as you forge forward.

With this in mind, we’ve set out to bring you even more valuable content that will encourage and inspire you with stories of other ambitious folks like yourself in our podcast.

This week we sat down with a special guest, Yannick Benjamin, Co-Founder of Wheeling Forward—an organization dedicated to working across all forms of disability to tackle some of the most underserved and challenging areas of need in the community. We learned how Wheeling Forward came to be, how Yannick juggles his various roles and responsibilities, avoids burnout, and manages anxiety.

Aside from his work with Wheeling Forward, Yannick is also an Advanced Sommelier with the Court of Master Sommeliers and has been recognized among Wine Enthusiast’s Top 40 under 40, has competed in several marathons across the country, was named Person of the Year by New Mobility Magazine in 2017, and is opening a restaurant, Contento, in the New York neighborhood of Harlem.

You won’t want to miss Yannick’s interview and words of wisdom. Check out the full video interview below or listen to the complete podcast here. 

In this interview we learn about Doron Gan, Yomez CEO, his background, why he started Yomez, and some things he's learned about principles and productivity.

If you want to reach a destination, you need to know where you are going. A personal mission statement is a valuable tool to define where you personally want to go

In order to be effective and travel on the path that you want, it’s important to have a sense of where you want to go. Seems simple enough, but how often do we really know our destination?

Stephen Covey mentioned that "Happiness is delayed gratification". I found this an interesting statement and really did not understand it till recently. Learn more in this week's podcast episode.

In this episode we discuss principles which are self evident natural laws that exist in the world and never change. These laws define long term consequences for our actions. When we know and remember these principles we can choose to act in ways that will give us the positive consequences we want.

Our ancient ancestors regularly faced life-threatening situations that drove them to choose between a fight or flight response. Thanks (I guess?) to these life-threatening moments, they developed and passed down this powerful physiological response that has ensured our survival for several millennia.

We often don’t fight off wooly mammoths or leap off cliffs for our survival these days, so our fight-or-flight response has some funny ways of showing up in the modern world. One of the ways in which our flight-or-fight response shows up today is in the form of procrastination.

Being proactive is the first Habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People because we must act in order for anything to happen. While this seems simple, it's actually a difficult thing to do because our tendency is to blame other people or circumstances instead of taking ownership and responsibility. In this podcast we talk about how to recognize reactive language (transferring responsibility) versus proactive language (taking responsibility and the power to choose). By recognizing when we use reactive language we can change  it to proactive and by doing that remind ourselves that we are empowered to choose our actions.

Its important for us to balance Production Capability (i.e. our ability to produce) and Production (our actual production) in order to be effective. When both are balanced, we are much more effective.

We continue our talk about Habit1, Be Proactive. We talk about how there is stimulus that occurs, our response, and the space between those two where we get to choose our actions. If we base our actions on correct Principles with the long term outcomes we want, we can make better decisions about how we choose to act.