Success through values, meaning, purpose, importance, and passion
Martha Graham's words on discipline, conformity, and freedom influenced me enough that I quoted her in several posts. She quotes T. S. Eliot describing "complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)." Two of my posts on her are "A master speaks on creative expression" and "A model on the foundation of personal freedom." I had to look up the T. S. Eliot reference, so, in case you would too, I'll copy his poem below, followed by a few words of context and another "poem" to contrast it with. Actually, this is just the closing part of the longer Four Quartets. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for…
[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 marks two years of daily burpees! Challenging healthy daily habits If you want a stable foundation on which to build a life of health, resilience, discipline, focus, and drive, you will find no better tool than daily exercise. You don't have to do burpees, but you won't easily match their combination of challenging yet injury-free cardiovascular workout without needing equipment, weather, money, or time. If you don't have such a daily healthy challenge and you read personal development literature, you're…
You can learn a lot about leadership from what great leaders say about people who led them. I'll show a video of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on his college coach, John Wooden, and then describe how it teaches a lot about leadership -- specifically motivating others. First a few words on each. Who are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and John Wooden? Abdul-Jabbar ranks among the best basketball players (and athletes of any sport) ever. According to Wikipedia's page on him, he was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), a record 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA selection, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team member. A member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two as an assistant coach, Abdul-Jabbar twice was voted NBA Finals MVP.…
Do you ever think about a message you've sent and wonder when you'll get a response, if you should follow up, and get stuck not knowing if you should respond now, while you're thinking about it, or later, but risk forgetting about it? When your mind is occupied like this you lose mental freedom. Often you can't stop your mind from dwelling on things like this -- important but that you can't finish right away. If you act in the moment and it's too early, you follow up too early and mess up something about the relationship. If you wait, you might forget and it will preoccupy your mind. I started doing something so simple and obvious most people probably already do it, but I…
I posted The Method on how to use The Model---my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development---in series form. Here is a link to it. I find the Model and Method the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. The Model tells you how we work. The Method shows you how to use The Model to lead yourself and others and create the lifestyle you want. I recommend reading The Model Series first, then reading this series for how to use the Model. Click to read it!
I posted The Model -- my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development -- in series form. Here is the link to it. I find this Model the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. Why? A model's value comes not from its accuracy but how well it serves its purpose, which improves from effective filtering of information. Street maps, for example, are more useful for driving for having less detail than, say, a satellite picture. Subway maps are more useful for their purposes for having yet less detail. For leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development, I find this model has an optimal amount…
"I don't like my job and I have to get a new one." Probably more than half my coaching clients say something like this, followed by "Please help me." A recent session with a client who started that way reinforced my standard approach, as I'll describe. The client I spoke to the other day so disliked his job he was ready to drive across the country to a city he'd never been to and had almost no connection to just to get away from it. His relationship with his job was poisoning many of his relationships because it affected his mood and feeling of ability to control important parts of his life. As I describe to clients, I use a two-pronged approach where the second…
A friend I met in North Korea is starting a site called Developed Life, a site that explores the next level of ideas in life, society, and business. He interviewed me in a podcast. Please click here, download, and listen to the podcast. He mostly interviewed me about my book, ReModel (paperback version here), which you should download and read too.
[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 I'm writing about the value of taking cold showers. Purposefully doing so can change your life more than jumping out of a plane or most other adrenaline-rush activities. You'd be amazed. You can give yourself life-changing experiences as exhilarating as jumping out of planes or bungee jumping without all the baggage people who do those things have to do. My picture at the top of the page swimming across the Hudson River illustrates how anyone can create inspirational, life-changing activities with minimal effort. Today I'm writing about…
Is overpopulation a problem? You probably have an opinion. A post on a forum asked that. I wrote the following, which I stand by. -------------------- Dozens of answers and nobody has had the humility to give the answer that we don't know, finding out is complex, the uncertainty on what we do know is large, and we have to extrapolate with many assumptions we can't check to draw any conclusions at all. The question is in principle a scientific question and "I don't know" is the best scientific answer I can think of. Anyone who tries to tell you a definitive answer almost certainly has an agenda beyond mere accuracy. There are many other questions we can probably answer now, for example Is it a…
I just finished exercising. Starting, as always, was hard. I know it only takes a couple days without exercise for me to start putting on fat and losing muscle definition. I also know if I get some cookies and start eating them I'll feel pleasure right away. There's no obvious reason I should choose the distant, unpleasurable reward of a fit body over the immediate pleasure of eating sweets and junk food. I know I'll feel that pleasure. I don't need anyone else to see it for me to feel it. I can get it myself. The world is increasingly populated with people who choose the pleasure of candy over the complexity of fruits and vegetables. Sometimes I think one of the defining characteristics of…
If you run, fools will tell you running is bad for your knees. One of the downsides of running is that these fools get excited to tell you that. So they do. I think they think they're helping, telling you something special that you don't already know. Let's get to the point. All exercise risks injuring you. All of my greatest injuries came from exercise or sports. Athletes get injured more than non-athletes. There is no sport or exercise with lower risk of injury than sitting on the couch, which is where you'll end up listening to those fools, which is why I call them fools. Search on "yoga injury" or any other sport and injury. People who exercise don't do it to avoid injury.…
If you like my blog, check out Josh Thompson's blog, "The implementation of change." His comment on my blog led me to read his and I found a lot of similar topics but from a different perspective. I couldn't help commenting on some of his posts. Then I found some things I wrote there relevant here, so I'm copying what I wrote there here. To his post, "Preparing to adopt a habit", I responded I find the key to making any behavioral change stick is the emotion you expect to bring from it. If you only change your environment, like changing jobs or buying a new car or house; or change your behavior with willpower, like creating a New Year's resolution; or change your thoughts, like…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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.] Two months in Tibet is a technique that complements accountability for the long-term part of leadership and personal development. It overcomes a major source of resistance for many people trying to change. Some background: One of the major sources of resistance when you try to change is other people. They know they old you. If they like you they like the old you. Changing your behavioral patterns without warning may confuse them and prompt them to worry if they will lose the…
Yesterday's Washington Post reported "NSA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, former U.S. officials say". I commented the following at Hacker News, which got voted as the top comment, and, as a testament to the ethos of tech-savvy people, at least in that community, one of my highest overall voted comments ever (see discussion here, and I recommend reading the comments on the Post's page too). More like "USA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, much of U.S. population says," I'd say. That happens when you do something most people would feel shame for. A major difference between NSA employees and the rest of us is that they can easily stop what they're doing. Let's hope their pitiful loss of morale leads them to develop…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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.] How do you start to plan? You've figured out a change you want to make in your life. How do you start to plan? You've always done X and now you want to stop it. Or maybe you've never done Y and you want to start. Or you want to do something differently. Coaching sessions with students often hit a break after we finish interpreting their feedback reports and they've chosen a leadership behavioral skill they want to work on and change.…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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 an earlier post in this series mentioned, assertiveness ranks highly as a skill students at Columbia want to develop as part of their leadership training. Most recognize it as an important skill for leadership -- that if they don't assert themselves, instead of leading they'll end up being led by others who assert themselves more. Most haven't had or created the opportunities to assert themselves professionally, having had few leadership roles. I find one of their biggest hurdles to asserting themselves…
The New Yorker this week published an article titled "Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them?" I responded (on Hacker News, where you can see discussion on it) More relevant questions: Why don't we stop subsidizing corn so much? Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school? Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools? If we can ban alcohol and tobacco sales to children, why not things like added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc? If we can ban alcohol and tobacco advertising to children, why not products with added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc? Why don't we limit advertising on fast and junk "food"? Why don't we provide healthy lunches to school children instead of using…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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.] One of the challenges and joys of coaching is that each client is unique. Even similar issues show up in unique ways with each person. The job never gets boring. Still, you see trends, especially among students taking similar courses at similar stages in their lives, often with similar goals. So what do MBA candidates at a top business school tend to want to work on? First, I'll mention that there is no overwhelming majority. Even the most common areas of focus…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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.] Do you ever have an amazing epiphany about a major change you will make in your life, or how you'll do it, and get excited about how awesome doing it will be? This happens a lot in coaching sessions, especially after their first 360-degree review and coaching session. They often have major realizations and make fantastic, far-reaching plans destined for enduring success. All that is awesome, but this realization came in the privacy of a distraction-free room, working with someone working to…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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.] Making change stick means practice and accountability. How do you find people to hold you accountable? The following advice works for everyone, not just business school students. I'll describe how it applies to your life after writing how I tell the students I do lightning coaching with. Leadership requires other people. Every time you work or do anything in a team is an opportunity to lead. For this reason Business School students have to work most of their first year in school-assigned…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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 mean practice in two senses here. The first is the more relevant one for the one-hour lightning coaching sessions -- as a coach, I try to find ways for my client to practice their new behavior during the session, all the more important in a lightning session when they won't have access to their coach again. Improvement in leadership means nothing if it only exists in your head and doesn't translate to new behavior. Leadership is fundamentally social, meaning it requires…
[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. 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.] Business schools and other vocational schools offer students something supremely valuable not everyone realizes. Everyone knows they give you knowledge, credibility, and a network. They also offer you protection from the outside world. You can do risky things in school that you might not do when your pay check or job depends on not messing up. In school, especially business school, you can risk failing in ways that might lose you your job, promotion, bonus, or other things of value. Many schools…
I compiled a series of posts on experiences and lessons from coaching MBA students at Columbia Business School. Click here to read the series. Meanwhile, here's the introductory text: Do you want to improve your leadership skills? Does this describe you: Highly motivated? Limited time? Want to know top-5 business school culture (or just learn to lead like someone from one)? This series will help you. Columbia Business School provides a service to its students helpful to anyone — it has each MBA candidate take a 360-degree report and gives each a coach to help interpret the results and create a plan to act on it. I took the program and have been coaching Columbia MBA students through this program for years. Since we have…
I try to look at things from a systems perspective when the perspective applies and helps. We often talk about a criminal justice system. If a system is a set of interacting or interdependent parts forming an integrated whole, parts not forming an integrated whole do not make up a system. Large segments of what we call our criminal justice system increasingly seems a non-system we've mislabeled out of hope or misunderstanding. On the same day I happened to read two articles. The first covered Toronto's Mayor Rob Ford, describing his apparently criminal antics including smoking crack, doing other drugs, pushing grandmothers, lying to the press, and more and the rest of the government's inability to remove him from office. For some reason it didn't…
