A client asked how to find your passion (in the context of relationships, as you’ll see). I wrote the following (slightly edited). ——————————– You don’t find some single latent passion within you, if only you can find it. You create it. What is passion? It’s powerful emotion. Emotion doesn’t come from out there. It comes from in here. How do you create something in here? Not by looking out there.[…] Keep reading →

Many times daily in North Korea you see someone crouching doing nothing but passing time. Usually they’re alone, but sometimes in a group. I kept meaning to take pictures, but it feels funny to take a picture of someone doing nothing. I found the two below on the web. As best you can tell they’ve been squatting all day and will be for a while longer. They’ll be in a[…] Keep reading →

If you like improving your life enough to read my stuff, you probably know about a study (probably one of many) that found that people who won the lottery and people who had accidents that left them in wheelchairs both returned to the same emotional levels a year later. What do you conclude from such results? How much can we misunderstand ourselves if winning the lottery doesn’t help out lives?[…] Keep reading →

Having written daily for a while I’ve found out great ways to generate lots of hits and to generate online discussion. I don’t do them on this page, despite how well they work. The tactics attract people to any media — press, tv, etc. Title Start with a title with a provocative question the answer is usually no to. Is Obama secretly working with the GOP? Can you make millions[…] Keep reading →

Between my talks and seminars and the university courses I’ve taught, I get to speak in public a fair amount. We all know one of the main challenges of public speaking is keeping the audience engaged — a bigger one being how to recapture an audience’s attention if you lose it. Here’s a trick that works every time. Although doing it can challenge you more than you think you can[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been meaning to write more about my April 2012 North Korea trip. I took tons of video, pictures, and notes there, but have been trapped behind China’s censoring of YouTube and I wanted to start by showing video. Well, you’ll have to wait to see the video, but I’ll start posting some text and pictures. I’m writing this post partly to sink my ships and force myself to write[…] Keep reading →

I mostly post pictures of cultural things like the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and millenia-old terracotta armies, but why not pictures of luxurious resorts I’ve indulged in? Maybe because the former are cultural and the resort in question — Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands — is commercial and makes its money from gambling? Maybe, but swimming in an infinity pool above Singapore also recalls when I swam across the Hudson River. And[…] Keep reading →

With all the news of the Higgs boson, you may have missed a big discovery in dark matter, a major remaining mystery of physics and astronomy. Most of the matter we can detect in the universe we can’t see directly. We can only see how it affects other things through gravity. Very mysterious! We have almost no way to constrain its properties besides gravity or experiment with it. Yet it[…] Keep reading →

Here is a deep question about values, spontaneity, risk, adventure, the best things in life, and your appetite for them. The context It begins with my mom’s garden years ago when she lived in Nebraska. Now I’m not that big on tomatoes, like some people are, and less so then than now. But when I tasted the cherry tomatoes from that garden they tasted like sunshine. I couldn’t believe how[…] Keep reading →