Success through values, meaning, purpose, importance, and passion
Arriana Huffington recently started an online community called Thrive Global. She and her team picked me up to write for their journal. In fact, one of my posts made today's front page, so if you click there today, you may see it. Thrive's content is organized into 6 categories: Wonder Wisdom Well-Being Unplug and Recharge Sleep Giving Wonder focuses on faith and spirituality. Wisdom focuses on burnout, workplace policies and culture, productivity and organizational tips, and more. Well-Being focuses on mental and physical health, mindfulness, self-care, and more. Unplug and Recharge is about disconnecting from technology. Sleep is the most self-evident of the categories. Finally, Giving focuses on how we can give back, whether through empathy or through charity. Otherwise, you can click to my…
Hello all, I'm changing the email provider for my newsletter. It turns out the old one was hitting some filters, so some of you may be getting my newsletter for the first time. So if you signed up a long time ago and are just seeing your first newsletter from me, welcome aboard! ... and sorry for the delay. I hope you enjoy the newsletter. Why I changed I changed because I'm starting to get the word out about my book, Leadership Step by Step, to launch in February. Here's a blurb from the back cover: Joshua is changing the game for leadership development and creating positive change. His insight to give a progression of exercises to practice is a once-in-a-lifetime game-changing advance in our…
"Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so more people want her to be president." Sour grapes. And meaningless. Look, I don't want someone who denies global warming in the White House either, but saying meaningless stuff doesn't help. All the candidates and all the voters knew the rules of the election years ahead. Winning the election means getting more electoral college votes. Those are the rules. Nobody campaigned to get more popular votes. Most Americans didn't vote. If the rules said the winner of the popular vote would become president, everyone would have run their races differently. The so-called "popular vote" doesn't represent the nation or even eligible voters. It's the side effect of a campaign to get electoral college votes. That's it. We don't…
Economists always claim that we need populations to grow for economies to grow, which they seem to regard as a necessity. I've never understood why growth is necessary, when what we need is to distribute life's necessities---food, water, shelter, etc---among people. Anyway, take economic growth as a necessity for the sake of argument. Economists also worry about losing jobs to other countries. Well, if having more people doesn't cause an economy to run out of jobs, doesn't that mean we can create more jobs even if some work moves away? If jobs aren't zero-sum, what's the problem with some going overseas? Don't other countries' growth mean we can collaborate with them and that they can buy our stuff? Or if we do have to worry…
LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 02: Gabrielle Douglas of the United States competes on the balance beam in the Artistic Gymnastics Women's Individual All-Around final on Day 6 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at North Greenwich Arena on August 2, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
My Inc.com post today, "Post-Games Lesson: You Have Two Options In Life" begins Post-Games Lesson: You Have Two Options In Life Even if we succeed, it can't last forever. Why do we try? The games in Rio just ended. Even the elite athletes' glory is fading from the most intense high of their lives, that they trained and sacrificed most of their lives for, to regular lives. As silver-medalist Adam van Koeverden said: I woke up on Tuesday, after traveling home on Monday, and I thought to myself, 'What do I have to do today?' And the answer was nothing. For a guy who won a silver, that transition sounds brutal. What about the majority who won nothing? Wait a second... the rest of…
Once no multi-celled life existed. Each single-celled life lived autonomously. I don't know how multi-celled life evolved, but it did and the cells in your body with your DNA have little autonomy. Your liver cells do what liver cells do and live in your liver. Your heart cells do heart cell things and that's it. Your nervous system has some decision-making and control, but they have little autonomy either. The body regulates cells' behavior through electrical and chemical signals. Single-celled life still exists. In multi-celled life, cells have evolved to follow specific patterns to help the body live and reproduce. People used to live mostly autonomously. We live less autonomously all the time as our organizations develop more effective ways to control us. The trend…
You've read about my online courses and their reviews. I'm working with some developers to create a new page to host the courses since joshuaspodek.com is a blog. I'd love to get the feedback of a few people on the new page, which is almost done. If you're a regular reader, have an interest in my courses, know how to give helpful advice and feedback on web pages, and are interested in helping, let me know. I'd appreciate the alternative perspectives.
I posted a couple weeks ago how what you studied in school doesn't restrict you from working outside that field. I've talked to a lot of people who feel because they studied a field they have to stay in it. I find it contrary to the point of education that increasing your knowledge in one area should lead someone to believe they are less qualified in another. Logically it makes no sense, but people live that way. Some even act as if the more excellence you have in one area the more it restricts you in another. The same follows for your work experience and all your other experiences. Doing one thing doesn't mean you can't do something else. It may take time for you…
I talk about mental models and beliefs and how they determine how you live. Two researchers ("Building a Better America−−One Wealth Quintile at a Time," Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science 2011 6: 9) asked Americans about their views on how wealth is distributed among Americans. The chart below summarizes some results. The top bar, "Actual," shows the distribution of wealth owned by each fifth of the population---the richest to the poorest. The blue bar shows that the richest own most of it. The poorest forty percent own so little it doesn't show on the graph. It makes me wonder what the distribution of wealth was in, say, France before their revolution. The next set of bars, labeled "Estimated," shows how…
Over the summer, after a great meeting, a well-placed woman I met began the process of offering me a job. To put me in touch with the decision-maker at the firm, she asked for my resume. I told her I preferred not to send it. Why did I decline to send it? The job looked great---a part-time role that would complement my personal projects, with autonomy, leadership, and the opportunity to grow. My resume looks great and well-suited for the role. I avoid sending resumes because people don't give final approvals to resumes. People use resumes to filter people out, not to approve them. At best a resume can get you an interview. If you can get an interview any other way, get it one…
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 seem to have contacts, so I think he was talking less to help and more to make himself feel good, hoping for future credit as the genius who made things work without people noticing he didn't do any work. Advice I ignore People like to give advice and a lot of it is a waste…
Skills I can develop. If I don't have them I can learn them. If someone else has a skill, it means I can get it too. If I value it and want it, I just have to learn it. Learning skills may take effort, time, attention, and other resources, but I can develop them. I coach skills to my clients because I find it enables them most to improve their lives too. Skills enable you to become independent. The more skills you develop the yet-more skills you can develop. Inborn talent either you have or you don't. I can't make myself faster than I can possibly go. Among people with inborn talent, the great ones are still great for the skills they developed. Sure Michael…
One of my readers used my blog in a job interview. I don't think he planned it, but he got the job. Here's his story: I used your Introvert/Extrovert X-Y axis in an interview a few years ago. He asked "Are you an introvert or an extrovert", and I said "Neither, and that's a dangerous question, and here's why" and started diagramming on a napkin. They seemed impressed, and I got the job. He sounded gutsy to me since people generally don't like their world views challenged. To do so with someone he barely knows in a position to evaluate him adds to the challenge, but if he knows what he's talking about and how to say it, a bigger challenge only shows off his…
The other day the New York Times posted an article "Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn't Poverty Declined?" that began The surest way to fight poverty is to achieve stronger economic growth. That, anyway, is a view embedded in the thinking of a lot of politicians and economists. "The federal government," Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth," which is not so different from the argument put forth by John F. Kennedy (in a somewhat different context) that "a rising tide lifts all boats." Longtime blog readers will identify "a rising tide lifts all boats" as a mental model that people apply to the economy.…
Want to see a subject I cover in more depth? Read one of my series. Sometimes I write a series of posts to develop an idea further than a single post allows. Here is a page listing of all of them. I wish I could convey how valuable the material in them is. I recommend reading them.
I've played this game for a while. I finally got a 4096 tile and got to 60,400 points. I've read about people getting a lot farther, but this was high enough for me to post.
Disaster! My computer won't start. Can I ask you a favor? Since my password to log into my web page is on the computer and I can't access my backup hard drive while my apartment renovations finish, as my web guy, you're my best hope to post something today. I have to meet a client for a full-day coaching session so I can't work on my computer until tomorrow. Would you mind logging in to my site and copying and pasting this email as-is to be my post today (before midnight Sunday into Monday NYC time)? For the title can you put "If you miss one day you can miss two. If you miss two it's over"? Posting daily is a SIDCHA I want to…
Perhaps the best honor one person can give another is to understand them and continue their legacy. I'm writing today's post to suggest you can do that with Martin Luther King more than you think. Many people believe Einstein got bad grades, but I understand he didn't. Martin Luther King, Jr got bad grades. He started graduate school at a school near Philadelphia called Crozer. Note among his grades -- the grades of one of the premier public speakers I've heard of -- he got a C in Public Speaking one term and a C+ in another term. He also got a C+ in Church Music and a C- in another class. Now look at his college grades. They are hard to read, but you'll…
30,000 burpees! That's a lot of burpees. I will hit that milestone tomorrow morning, or thereabouts, assuming forty burpees per day starting December 21, 2011. The first few months I ramped up from ten per day so I might have done fewer, but I've also done a bunch of extras to make up for eating or drinking too much unhealthy food or drink. I've influenced a few people to do more burpees themselves. The ones it affected most got it most. They remarked that the value comes not from a burpee here or there, or even dozens of them here or there, but the disciplined practice of daily burpees. I find the greatest value comes not from doing over a hundred burpees in a short…
joshuaspodek.com now has an Archives page, listing every post by date from today's until my first post. Check it out! You might find a valuable post you wouldn't have otherwise.
I wrote a series of posts on willpower. I assembled them into series format so you can read them all at once. Check it out. For reference, the first post goes like this: Most people know what they should do to create the life for themselves they want. Sadly, most people don't do what they feel they should. They do what's easy. People who want to lose weight keep eating chocolate cake. People who want to build muscle skip going to the gym. People who want to manage their time better still indulge in wasting time. Sound familiar? A necessary ingredient to improving your life is being able to choose to do what you think you should when your emotions say otherwise--to skip the chocolate…
[This post is part of a series on the Self-Imposed Daily Challenging Healthy Activity (SIDCHA). 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.] I bet most successful people have at least one self-imposed daily challenging healthy activity (introducing what should become a standard personal development term SIDCHA, pronounced sid'-chah), whether they developed them intentionally or not. I bet most losers have none. And I bet the more you develop SIDCHAs, the better you'll find your life, however you define success. To live well you have to choose to live well, which means choosing to do the activities that create the life you want. SIDCHAs train you…
People treat some days as special days to devote time to their values. Why not treat every day as a day to devote to your values? Then you can treat every day like a holiday. I try to. If you don't, why not? If you want to but can't, why not? Most people say something about having to make money or some other obligation. If you have obligations you can't change, change your values, which you can do by changing your beliefs. The alternative is feeling miserable, which benefits no one. If you don't think you can change your values or beliefs... well, you can. The you can make every day a holiday for you. Happy holidays, everyday.
[This post is part of a series on Cold Showers. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view that series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Today is my twenty-second of thirty taking deliberate cold showers. It's an amazing experience I would never have guessed as valuable as I've found it. I'll write more on it after day thirty. For now I'll note two things: Cold showers are incredibly invigorating. You can't leave a cold shower bored, lazy, lethargic, or depressed. They give you energy. They build mental fortitude. After you decide to start a cold shower and to stay in for five minutes, not eating a piece of chocolate cake is trivial. Yesterday…
I wrote a series of posts on "Getting rid of guilt and blame for good." I assembled them into series format so you can read them all at once. Check it out. For reference, the first post begins like this. Do you like feeling guilty or doing things that make you feel guilt? Do you find blaming people improves your life? Not likely. Would you prefer alternatives that don't make you feel bad and do improve your life? Of course. Feeling guilt and blaming others have become rare for me. Life is better without them: I feel better, have more rewarding relationships, have fewer conflicts, and resolve what conflicts I do have more quickly and easily than before. When you understand why you feel them…
