Last month on my way home from Shanghai I got some great customer service. On a fifteen-hour flight, a human touch can make a big difference. Also, since I don’t eat meat and tend to eat more than what the airline provides, she brought me some undistributed extra food from business class. I think it helped that I always use Doctor Joshua Spodek for reservations — I didn’t go through[…] Keep reading →

In a recent online discussion a guy talking about a tv show on morbidly obese people talked about people on the show disparagingly. He also said he used to be fat. Other people took him to task and criticized him as insulting and rude. I’m not sure I agree he was necessarily insulting and rude. For one thing, he later clarified he said what he did in part “to galvanise[…] Keep reading →

This TED talk on body language covers several things I cover in my seminar. I recommend watching it. The speaker is Amy Cuddy. From Wikipedia Amy J. C. Cuddy is an American social psychologist known for her studies of the relations between stereotyping and behavior. She is Associate Professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. Cuddy studies the origins and outcomes of how people judge and[…] Keep reading →

At the risk of posting too much on the recent storm and handling challenges, one more angle. Imagine a storm destroys two neighbors’ houses equally. Imagine they also have equal material resources to handle the situation. One neighbor looks at the wreckage and says My home is destroyed. I have to start from scratch. But I built my life up in the first place. I can do it again. I[…] Keep reading →

I asked my friend in Bayonne that I wrote about yesterday, whose neighborhood the storm destroyed, to review yesterday’s post before putting it up. I found his comments inspiring. I know when reading them I hear his voice. As a personal trainer, he’s almost always upbeat and I can hear his motivating tone in these words. I hope that upbeat, non-judgmental tone comes across in the words. Other people have[…] Keep reading →

A reader raised the question for me of how to respond to others’ suffering. She wrote about my recent posts about the aftermath of the storm: You may want to show some empathy at your blog for those hardest hit who have been displaced from their homes with children, not knowing whether to stay or go, not having many options at their disposal, worried for the safety of their children,[…] Keep reading →

It’s hard to think when your mind is swimming with information. I used to have a lot of trouble starting writing documents any longer than a couple pages. Come to think of it, I’d have similar issues with starting to create many things — ideas, research and development for my company, resolving problems with friends and colleagues, and so on. Then I found probably the best software I’ve found to[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Somehow in all my ultimate frisbee, rowing, burpee, running, and healthy food talk, I forgot to mention the most important parts of any exercise or diet[…] Keep reading →

People think they’re values stay constant. They change all the time. Here’s a simple example. It may seem like it’s on a small or unimportant. The principle applies to lots of places. When I was a kid Sony came out with the Walkman, revolutionizing listening to music. You could bring a cassette with you anywhere and listen to it without bothering others. Suddenly people who never felt they needed music[…] Keep reading →