Hustlers and clowns are two types of business people I’ve found. Actually, they’re everywhere, not just business, but I’ll talk about them in a business context. Hustlers Hustlers do what it takes to do the job by learning and meeting people’s needs. I love working with hustlers, at least the type I mean. The student who sold an apple as a challenge for five dollars and made the buyer feel she[…] Keep reading →

I write and talk about emotions a lot. I find many people consider them ethereal and mysterious so don’t understand them. As a result, they close off an important part of their identity. Many people think of our minds having a rational side and an emotional side. They think of the rational side as reasonable. They contrast the emotional side with it and consider emotions as irrational and weird, not[…] Keep reading →

What’s the difference between emotions and passions? In a leadership context I look at emotions functionally, as motivations. In an art or music context, I think more about how emotions feel and how to express them. To distinguish them, I think the functional view helps more. A passion is something that motivates you strongly with strong feelings. In other words, a passion is a strong or intense emotion. A lot[…] Keep reading →

An attendee from a recent seminar asked a common question I get about learning other people’s passions: How do you motivate someone who claims to have no motivation? He did the exercise in this post, “How to make someone feel understood: the Confirmation Cycle,” where you ask the other person their passion. He wrote: How do you deal with the “I don’t know” when you ask people what they enjoy or[…] Keep reading →

One of the greatest improvements in my life was switching from what I call the Dandelion Model of solving problems to the Burning Building Model. This week’s New Yorker describes a major successful application of the Burning Building Model in James Surowiecki’s article, “Home Free?“. Briefly, the Dandelion Model of problem solving starts with the belief that if you don’t solve a problem from its roots, then like a dandelion,[…] Keep reading →

I found a problem that I think helps no one last year teaching entrepreneurship at NYU, also as a mentor. Nearly all the students I worked with were born outside the U.S. They picked my course, “Entrepreneurial Marketing and Sales” or picked me as a mentor largely because they liked entrepreneurship. Many wanted to become entrepreneurs. As much as they wanted to start businesses, many of our conversations had this[…] Keep reading →

If I did my math right, today is my one-thousandth day of burpees, starting at one set of ten per day, now up to two sets of twenty-five per day. That’s somewhere over 40,000 burpees. I’ve done them in North Korea, China, and across the U.S. Following the principle that if you miss one day you can miss two, if you miss two it’s all over, I haven’t missed one[…] Keep reading →

In motivation, influence, and persuasion, sales and leadership overlap a lot. Sales is also the most common route to CEO, I’ve heard, so if you want to lead, you benefit from learning sales. Below is a video interviewing a guy who is incredible at sales. He sold an apple for five dollars, with the buyer believing she got a discount! My retelling the story about it led to a friend[…] Keep reading →

Most of the work of leadership is grunt work—doing what it takes to support the people you’re leading. Then some sales work to make sure people don’t see you as just a grunt worker. You have to take responsibility for how people see you because no one else will. I recently took on a leadership role in a project with incredibly accomplished people, helping create a potentially high-profile result. If[…] Keep reading →