If someone doesn’t feel understood, they will not listen and will do what they can to feel understood until they feel understood. Or until they give up on you understanding them, in which case you’ve lost your credibility and ability to influence them. Want to break up with someone? Intentionally misunderstand them. They’ll lose patience with you, feel increasingly frustrated, and want to spend increasingly less time with you. If[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday at a dinner party someone heard me describe my work and started giving me advice. It sounded like something that would take resources to act on and it didn’t sound better than what I was already doing. I politely told him so many people offer me advice, I find the only advice worthwhile is when the person offers a contact where everyone would benefit from the connection. He didn’t[…] Keep reading →

Since I work on motivation, I’ve read a ton of diet and exercise books. They generally try to fill you up with information. While filling your head with information doesn’t necessarily hurt your fitness efforts, it won’t likely help either. And any book claiming any latest and greatest methods can’t get over that countless people before that book created fit, healthy bodies for themselves. Information doesn’t make you fit. Behavior,[…] Keep reading →

My seminar, “How to lead people so they want you to lead them again,” and the General Assembly seminar coming up August 23, “Lead the way: Effective Leadership Techniques,” teach you how to inspire people. I talk about it in a work context, but the principles and techniques apply everywhere. Last week I outlined how inspiration feels. As a leader, inspiring people raises morale, loyalty, productivity, efficiency, and more. It[…] Keep reading →

This Saturday, August 23, 10am-5pm, I’ll lead a seminar with General Assembly on leadership in New York City. Register here, you’ll be glad you did. This is the seminar that led to this testimonial: Josh, you may be interested to know I took out an Associate who will be working on my team and used your technique. She teared up, saying, no one ever asked her these questions and she[…] Keep reading →

Read my post on “Thoughts on mourning” before continuing. If you don’t view death as I wrote about it there, you may want to skip today’s post. It’s serious. It’s not about leadership. For me it’s about emotions in dire situations and personal growth. Others may view it as something morbid that they don’t want to read about. Both husband and wife in a married couple with three young children[…] Keep reading →

Executive pay in the U.S. is out of hand and everybody knows it. Wikipedia put it well Executive compensation in the United States differs from other employee compensation in the forms it takes, laws and regulation it is subject to, its dramatic rise over the past three decades and wide ranging criticism leveled against it. In the past three decades in America executive compensation or pay has risen dramatically beyond[…] Keep reading →

One of the main reasons I started thinking about physics was a college course I took called something like “Philosophy and Physics” by a Professor I liked a lot, David Albert. He’s still teaching courses on the philosophy of science. The course covered the challenges of understanding the results of quantum mechanics experiments which look nothing like regular life—double slit experiments and things like that. I loved the course. I[…] Keep reading →

Do people say to you “You’re thinking about it too much,” or “You’re analyzing it too much,” or things like that? I usually tell them that to me ideas are like Lego pieces. I like turning them around, looking at them from different angles, seeing how I put them together with others, taking them apart and reassembling them, and so on. So to me when someone says I’m thinking about[…] Keep reading →