North Korean monuments, part 1
NorthKorea

North Korean monuments, part 1

North Korea likes to do things big and nationalistic. Here are some images of their bigger monuments. Above is the (in)famous Ryugyong non-Hotel, started in 1987 for completion in 1989 but never finished. When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea had insufficient resources to finish the building, which was costing 2% of the country's GDP at the time. I've read that using too-low-quality concrete and crooked elevator shafts make the building not only impossible to complete, but a huge metaphor for the country's inability to enter the modern world. In any case, it remains unused today. What look like lights in this picture are just reflections from our bus window. North Korea's triumphal arch, built to commemorate not their liberation from Japanese occupation, but Kim…

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August 8, 2012
Art / Blog / Entrepreneurship / Freedom / Leadership

How to become a superstar

This post is about breakout success in any area -- starting a company, making CEO, being a superstar boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, etc -- but I'll put it in the language of entertainment superstardom. I'll leave translating it to the language of the field you want to succeed in as an exercise. But I guarantee it applies. Superstars make it look so easy. They dress how they want, say what they want, and do what they want and the world loves them for it. Everyone else has to think about what they say and do all the time -- and then gets judged for it. How do they do it? Building a solid foundation I'm conservative about hitting it big. This quote on a Bruce…

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August 8, 2012
Blog / Fitness / Freedom

My coffee habit and rules

Everybody has their deal with how they drink coffee -- how many cups per day, where they get it, etc. I've written about my habits. Here's the coffee habit I designed for myself. I should remind anyone I haven't mentioned this to that I find creating habits creates freedom. Some things you have to figure out anew whenever they enter your life. But for things that happen the same every day, once you figure out what's right for you, creating a habit frees you from having to think about it all the time. I'm writing this post not to recommend you adopt my rule, but to show an example of a habit I created to create more freedom for myself. If I seem overly pedantic…

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August 7, 2012
Art / Creativity / Education / NorthKorea

More on North Korea’s art

From my notes while I was there in April: North Korean performance art: technical perfection while appearing effortless ... emote wonder and hokey joy ... layer it on ... add difficulty. Zero subtlety. That just about describes it. I also noted the following. Something tells me that the technical perfection in North Korean arts reflects middling ability in its leadership to prove its self-worth. Maybe I extrapolated too far, but someone is driving their artistic and athletic direction. Since North Korea controls personal expression so much, they can't motivate their artists to express themselves how they want, so how can they promote something like art? They can promote easily quantifiable and measurable results. North Koreans can justifiably say they're better than nearly anyone else on…

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August 7, 2012
Blog / Fitness

Why I don’t like watching soccer

If you don't mind my indulging in sharing a pet peeve of mine perhaps unrelated to leadership and my other usual topics, playing Ultimate again this summer combined with being outside the U.S. during a major soccer event (I think the European cup was major), I got to think about soccer and values. I find soccer players often shameful and occasionally repulsive. Just my opinion, of course, but I already mentioned I'm indulging myself today. People speculate Americans don't like soccer as much as the rest of the world because it doesn't score as much or doesn't allow for easy commercial breaks. If only those were the problems I had with the sport I wouldn't mention anything. Sports are more important to me than just…

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August 6, 2012
Awareness / Blog / Fitness

Three things I learned from yoga

You can learn a lot from yoga. I'm no expert, but I did it a couple times a week for a couple years a few years ago. My teacher was great, if anyone wants a recommendation for someone in New York City. I learned three things I didn't expect that I found valuable. I haven't seen them written up elsewhere, not that I read much on yoga since I find most yoga writing too new age-y, so I thought I'd write them up here. I should mention I don't find yoga more life altering than any other physical activity. Some people attach a mystical aura to it, with all the foreign words and claims to thousands-of-years-old heritages, but I find any physical activity can give…

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August 5, 2012
North Korean children’s nearly unbelievable performances
Art / Creativity / Education / NorthKorea

North Korean children’s nearly unbelievable performances

The pictures below don't even approach showing the almost unbelievable performance ability of North Korean children. Joseph's pictures showcase their talent better. But no images can show the professionalism, dedication, and raw talent these kids have. The pictures below are from the Children's Palace, which trains children to perform and create art and puts on incredible performances. After their performance last time, my travel groupmate who was starting a school to train opera singers, reacted with disgust at the performance. As I understood, he saw their type of performance -- technical perfection that could only result from repeated drilling and repetition devoid of personal expression -- as destroying everything he valued about art -- personal expression and emotional exploration. He saw children whose artistic world…

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August 4, 2012
Awareness / Blog / Leadership / Tips

How far should I develop myself? It’s hard!

A client asked me about doing exercises to develop leadership and social skills. He pointed out most people don't do them. Some people do them differently. He's been doing them a while and has seen some progress, but knows he has a long way to go. He asked my thoughts on how much he should do. I wrote the following. I look at leadership and social skills, leadership, and self-awareness exercises like learning any major life skill, like playing a sport, learning to dance, to play music, etc. In sports you have to run drills. You have to run sprints, sometimes in the rain, sometimes when you don't think you have it in you. You can skip those things, but in sports you compete, so…

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August 4, 2012
Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Freedom

An olympic shock

I tend to divide the Olympics as a business from the athletes. I respect the athletes greatly. Whatever ideals the event may have embodied, I lose respect for the Olympic committees and the collaborating corporations -- media companies, advertisers, etc -- all the time. The business seems to focus on making money while protecting its sustainable competitive advantage -- its brand -- at draconian costs to the freedom of athletes, attendees, and other participants. Meanwhile the Olympic committee takes bribes, applies rules arbitrarily, colludes with governments to curtail speech and coverage of the events, etc. The value of sports continues to surprise me Still, the value of sports perennially surprises me in raising people's awareness and cooperation, despite the politicization and commercialization of the Olympics.…

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August 3, 2012
An interesting character in North Korea
NorthKorea

An interesting character in North Korea

I don't have any story behind the guy in the picture below. We were at the cemetery for North Korea's martyrs on the anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth, which was like being at Arlington on July 4th. As you can see behind him, columns and columns of soldiers paid respect from before we arrived until after we left. As for him, I couldn't tell if he held authority or if he would have been seen as dressed respectfully or what there. I thought he looked sharp and couldn't resist taking his picture. Click on the picture for a larger version or email me for a higher resolution version.

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August 3, 2012
Blog

Why do you read joshuaspodek.com? What do you want to see more or less of?

Readership and subscriptions have been increasing lately. I figure people like something about what I write, but you probably have ways you'd like to improve it. In the style of feedforward (an immensely helpful technique I recommend to anyone who wants to improve their life), I'll put questions to readers for you to respond by contacting me directly or posting in the comments below. I want to improve my blog, you're reading it, you know what you like and don't like. I wonder if you could suggest a few ways to improve it. Here are some questions to get you thinking What do you like reading about most or least? What do you wish to read about that I don't post on? Why do you…

6 Comments
August 2, 2012
Genuine North Korean emotion and tears
NorthKorea

Genuine North Korean emotion and tears

Non-North Koreans had a field day with the videos of people crying they saw after Kim Jong-Il's death last year. People saw it as over-the-top and probably forced at the pain of punishment. I wrote on that crying before. On this trip, on April 15 -- the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth -- we got to visit the newly unveiled colossal statue of Kim Jong-Il next to his father's colossal statue. The pictures below are just after we -- the whole group, but Jordan, Joseph, and me pictured -- visited the statues behind us up close (no cameras were allowed much closer than we were). You can see behind us hundreds of North Koreans approaching the feet of the statues. In the time…

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August 2, 2012
Blog / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

Facebook’s woes and what it could have done instead

If you know me, you'd expect Facebook's woes to mean the problems Facebook inflicts on its users who haven't left it yet. After all, leaving Facebook is easy and fun. Yes, they're reaching a billion users, but I'm no longer one of them and once you leave the site seems weird, like why would you do business with such a creepy company. From the New York Times, Facebook Shares Plummet in an Earnings Letdown: "Unhappy with Facebook’s first financial report as a public company Thursday, investors fled the stock in droves..." Most of you probably expect the drop resulted from my calling the company creepy and you may be right, but I think the greater problems come from inside Facebook, and decisions they made based…

2 Comments
August 1, 2012
NorthKorea

Pyongyang’s slums

A detour brought us to something few non-North Koreans, and probably few North Koreans, get to see -- the other side of the tracks in Pyongang. April 15 was the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth, something like July 4, 1776 in the United States. Amid the hubbub, they detoured our bus from whatever our route was supposed to be to a driving along some dilapidated and run-down places. The government so heavily controls what anyone sees, especially foreigners, this must have been an accident of the once-in-a-lifetime chaos of the day. I would call the area a slum, but it was nothing like slums elsewhere, like in American cities. Things were old and decrepit but empty. I had no sense…

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August 1, 2012

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