I don’t know about you, but I grew up scared to speak in public. I was mortified to sing in public. Karaoke was one of the scariest things for me to do. I enjoyed it when I got drunk enough, but that meant I’d have to deal with horrible hangovers. As a result, I didn’t sing much karaoke — maybe a few times in my whole life. Of course, I[…] 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.] Today, December 21, 2012, marks the 365th day of my exercise regiment of daily burpees. They began with me talking to a friend about exercise, then[…] Keep reading →

Here are the same pictures as from the previous post in a slide show, randomly ordered. Funny, I was thinking about the questions I asked. They feel like leading questions, but reading them, they seem open-ended. I guess you can tell my values. I could have asked questions about market share, returns on investment, competitive strategy, and so forth to get different pictures to rank higher. Things have different values[…] Keep reading →

My post on Variety, choice, the manufactured illusion of it, and creating more yourself prompted more people emailing me about the images than most others. The way all the corporate stuff trying to catch your eye glosses over. I decided to contrast the corporate image with images from nature. I just did three images searches, on “fruit,” “vegetable,” and “forest,” and posted a couple of the images from the first[…] Keep reading →

For Want of a Nail For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. A nail[…] Keep reading →

I came across a great quote in a Sundance Grand Jury Prize movie called American Splendor about  comic book writer Harvey Pekar. If you don’t know about Harvey Pekar or his comic book series, American Splendor (they named the movie after it), he was a mostly regular guy with a regular job as a file clerk in a hospital in Cleveland. He saw comic books with super-heroes in tights as[…] Keep reading →

News from home comes slowly and filtered here in China. I know only the basic facts about the shooting in Connecticut. I saw Obama’s first speech on it, but little more. I don’t know much of what happened or how the nation is reacting to it, but I know people are dealing with death and grief. In all my communications on the subject, I’ve found the most helpful this passage[…] Keep reading →

I recently came across a poem I remember reading in college and liking enough to copy into my computer. I’ve tried to find a way to connect it to this page’s usual themes of leadership and personal development. I can’t, but I like the poem enough to post it anyway. I hope you like it enough to indulge my digression / indulgence. It’s by Kakinomoto Hitomaro (c. 662 – 710).[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on empathy gaps. 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.] As a final note on empathy gaps, I wanted to note a few examples of empathy gaps — using them, observing them in others, and observing them in yourself. Researchers normally present empathy[…] Keep reading →