LATEST BLOG POSTS

How many kids should you have? I’ve heard people justify how many kids they should have for various reasons. I think of how decisions happen. We tend to decide first, based on emotions—the wiring we were born with that helped our ancestors live—then rationalize it to make it feel right now that we’ve decided to do it. If our motivations don’t match what we claim our reasons are, might we[…] Keep reading →

I write a lot about cold showers. They may sound crazy, but bear with me and you may find them more helpful than you could have imagined. After taking a few in Shanghai because the water took five minutes to warm up that I couldn’t stand wasting, in December of 2013, I took thirty days of cold showers. I can’t tell you how much the discipline, dedication, and so on[…] Keep reading →

In the fall of 2014, I noticed a lot of my garbage came from food packaging. I don’t like when people pollute my world, so I try to avoid polluting theirs. I thought of an experiment: to try to go one week without buying any food where I’d have to throw away food packaging. For six months I planned and thought about doing it until one day I realized all[…] Keep reading →

I wrote an in-depth piece answering why we as a culture and as individuals tend to lack initiative, as developed in my book, and how to develop more initiative. It presents more from my book than most reviews or excerpts I’ve posted. The piece is called Initiative: Why We Lack It and How to Develop It and appears in a community site for coaches and people getting coached called The[…] Keep reading →

I ran into my podcast guest who lives near me and has a Nobel Prize and he happened to have it with him. He didn’t have it when he came over to record and for my famous no-packaging vegetable stew, so I hadn’t seen it. So there we were on Sixth Avenue, people walking by not realizing we were holding a genuine Nobel Prize. On the podcast I asked him[…] Keep reading →

Laura and I explore the feelings and emotions around our environmental behavior, specifically that we don’t like, like throwing away food. I predict you’ll find her descriptions of how people feel familiar. In other episodes I’ve shared how I find that our emotions are causing our environmental problems, not CO2. The behavior of CO2 simply results from our behavior. That’s why I feel what’s missing is leadership: influencing people’s emotions.[…] Keep reading →

Sammy is a cofounder and COO of Fitspot Wellness — a fully managed solution for companies and properties, bringing on-site and digital workplace wellness programs and amenities to engage employees and tenants through community experiences. Sammy is an attention-to-detail aficionado who brings a blend of grit and imagination to the zillions of tasks that confront every startup. She has always thrived in operations, working as a production assistant in LA[…] Keep reading →