America loves and hates bad boys. The media vilify and attack small transgressions. Take Howard Dean. He wasn’t even a bad boy and the media destroyed him after he expressed too much joy and he went from first place to no chance. Yet others who break more stringent rules become icons—in fact, some of our most highly regarded and lauded. Why the difference? Why did Howard Dean go down while[…] Keep reading →

Many adults wonder how to make new friends. If the following sounds familiar, read my response below it. I feel like I only have like one guy friend maybe 2. The one we don’t have a ton in common but our wives are friends so we hang out. The other is a guy friend from work we eat lunch together quite a bit and chat at work but never anything[…] Keep reading →

I live on the fifth floor and come and go from home several times a day. If I take the elevator, I have to make extra time to exercise for the time I’m standing in the elevator depriving myself of getting my heart pumping. It’s faster and more convenient to take the stairs and not spend the same time making myself more lazy.

Continuing my series of alternative responses to the New York Times column, The Ethicists, looking at the consequences of one’s actions instead of imposing values on others, here is my take on today’s post,  “Should I Help a Classmate Who Sexually Harassed My Friend Get a Job?” At work, we fill a lot of vacant positions through word of mouth. I recently posted a job on my college’s career network[…] Keep reading →

“If lean startup methodology doesn’t work for you, then maybe you’re a candidate for the alternative method of company creation espoused by Joshua Spodek, entrepreneur, professor and coach at Columbia and NYU. Spodek explained his process to an enthusiastic and receptive audience at the Princeton Tech Meetup at the Princeton Public Library on July 16, in a talk titled “8 Steps from No Idea to Funding.”” So begins an article,[…] Keep reading →

Articles like “Can cities kick ads? Inside the global movement to ban urban billboards” remind me of North Korea, where I saw pictures of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il in most rooms of every building I entered. I wondered, “how does it affect someone’s life to see those pictures every day, everywhere?” Then I realized people there weren’t comparing their environments to ones they didn’t know about. The images probably[…] Keep reading →

A friend wanted to develop expertise in a field by getting more degrees in school. As I wrote in “Programmers work with computers and leaders work with people,” people with functional skills can solve problems in that functional area: carpenters can solve problems with wood, plumbers can solve problems with pipes, and so on. Leaders can solve problems with people. Expertise is nice, but if you have leadership skills, you[…] Keep reading →