Most organizations hire the person to fit the job. There is a fixed slot, a rigid list of duties, and the search is for someone who can be poured into it. Kim E. Dooley tried the opposite, and in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she makes the case that it is the better way to build a team. When she was appointed an associate dean, she inherited something she had never managed before: staff. As a professor, she had always chosen coll

Nobody sets out to reinvent themselves. It almost always starts with the floor falling out. Kim E. Dooley would not have chosen the disaster that remade her, and in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she is honest that at the time it felt like pure wreckage. But she makes a quietly radical case about that wreckage. Starting over is not chaos, and it is not luck. It has a structure, one that researchers have mapped, and once you can se

For most of your working life, “What do you do?” is an easy question. You give your title, and the room understands who you are. Then one day the title goes away, and the same question lands very differently. Kim E. Dooley knows that silence well. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she admits that even after stepping back from her career, she still introduces herself as “Kim Dooley, Regents Professor Emerita,” because the title fee

There is a moment, usually uninvited, when the life you built stops fitting. A career ends. A job goes to someone else. The house empties, or a diagnosis rearranges everything overnight. You look up and realize the person you have always been is not quite the person you are anymore, and you have no idea who comes next. Kim E. Dooley knows that moment well. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she writes about reaching the edge of a l

Old Enough to Be Wise, Young Enough to Keep Learning We treat the two words as if they mean the same thing. They do not, and the distance between them is where most of life actually gets lived. Kim E. Dooley spent a career as a professor and researcher, and her work carried her into 50 countries. If anyone had earned the right to feel knowledgeable walking into a new place, it was her. Yet in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she kee

There is a moment most people recognize but rarely talk about. The moment when the life you spent decades building suddenly stops fitting. The job where you gave everything; the identity you wore so long it felt like skin. And then, without much warning, it’s gone. When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley, PhD, is the book that sits with you in that moment and says, quietly, same. It Opens With Alligators and Only Gets Better Before th

A Life That Doesn’t Follow the Script What if the moments you wish you could erase — your failures, embarrassments, and unexpected detours — were actually the most important parts of your story? In When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, author Kim E. Dooley invites readers into a deeply personal, often hilarious, and profoundly honest journey through a life that refuses to stay perfectly in tune — and is all the better for it. This isn’t a polished,

Life rarely follows the tune we expect. Plans fall apart, moments turn awkward, and sometimes everything feels like it’s happening completely out of rhythm. Yet in When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, Kim E. Dooley, PhD reveals something refreshing — those imperfect moments often become the most meaningful chapters of our lives. This memoir isn’t a polished highlight reel. It’s a vivid, honest collection of stories that prove wisdom doesn’t come f

A middle-aged man walked into a bank. He approached the teller and asked, “Will you cash this check?” The teller looked at the check. “Well sure, I can cash the check. Just put your name on the back of it, hand it to me, and I will give you the money.” The man stumbled back and said, “Whoa, wait a minute! I don’t want to put my name on the back of that check and hand it to you. You’ll be holding my check with my name on it and you might decide not to give me the money.” “Well

In order to manifest our dreams, we need to align our self-image with the life we would love living. If your sense of deserving isn’t wide and deep enough to hold your dream, you will fall short. How do you know if you deserve your dream? If you are breathing, you deserve to have your heart’s desire. Simply by virtue of you being alive you are worthy and deserving of your dream. You wouldn’t feel the longing if you didn’t have the capacity to manifest your dream. Here are t

Making the decision to dream big can be a scary endeavor for many people, and yet it’s the exercise that leads us to living a life we absolutely love. What if we gave ourselves permission to dream beyond our current reality? Where could these thoughts take us? Taking these three steps can help you begin building your dream life. 1. Honor your discontent. Discontent is an important signal from our soul that something bigger is seeking to emerge through us. Give yourself permis

Good news: you get to choose what kind of life you are going to live. Some people live ninety years; some people live one year ninety times. You can live a life pushed by discontent and unsettledness, or you can live a life overflowing with abundance. What kind of life are you willing to live? Step 1: Ask yourself whether you are willing to live in abundance. There are two houses, one with electricity and one without. The wires are available to them both, but only those in th

I came across this powerful true story and wanted to share it with you... George Danzig was a grad student in mathematics at a time when jobs were very, very difficult to get in the United States. His math professor, who was the head of the mathematics department, said to the grad students that whoever got the best grade on the final had the opportunity to be hired as his research assistant for the next year. That job was a plum job. Everybody wanted the job. George said that

Here’s a great story for you! A group of scientists who having discovered the secrets of cloning decided they would have a conference with God to tell God He was no longer needed. Yes, God had created humanity and all of life, in fact, from the very dust of the earth. But now science had taken over the job and God could retire. So the top scientists in the world gathered together and they called God to a conference having told God, He/She was no longer required. God said, “Ex

There was a study done recently at Harvard called the Zero Point study that was a ten year study on genius. The genius capacity is demonstrated by certain individuals that bring forth great ideas, transformational thinking, movement, social change, innovative ideas that transform and transpose us to a whole new height of living. What is this capacity? The researchers began to define genius as the number of modalities with which one takes in information, synthesizes that infor

We don’t always know what our life’s purpose or journey is supposed to be or we may have so dreams we are overwhelmed with them all. However, one thing is for sure: if we are feeling restless or discontent we are not living our dreams! Feelings of discontent and longings for something else, even when we don’t know for sure toward what we are being drawn, are actually calls from God to pursue our greater good. We discover true desire by first noticing discontent. When you expe

I’ve heard it said that some people live ninety years and others live one year ninety times. The difference is that those living their years to the fullest are living their dreams. We are all capable of living our dream lives when we open ourselves up to possibilities and opportunities. We have been trained to look at conditions to determine what the opportunities and possibilities are for our lives, though these conditions can be limiting when viewed with just the five sense

Imagine that you are fast asleep in your balcony cabin on deck six of Carnival Triumph. Around 5 am you wake up with a speaker system blaring: Alpha team to the engine room ! You don’t quite understand the code, so you try to go back to sleep. Suddenly, it is deadly silent. No buzzing from lights or air conditioning systems. You sleepily get up with a glimmer of sunlight and walk out on the balcony. You see smoke. You smell smoke. A friendly voice in a British accent comes o

In today's fast-paced and ever-changing business environment, effective leadership is more crucial than ever. Executive leaders must possess a unique set of skills and competencies to navigate complex challenges and drive their organizations toward success. The following core competencies are essential for any executive leader aiming to make a significant impact. Stay Focused on Purpose One of the most critical competencies for executive leaders is the ability to stay focused