I adopt new technologies slowly, often not at all before the trend passes. If you’ve ever thrown away something you felt you needed when you bought it and now can’t give away, I believe you’ll find doing so helps you enjoy life more. If you know that the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from land, has garbage polluting it, I suggest you consider slowing your adoption too. I’m not[…] Keep reading →

If you’ve talked to me in the past few years, you’ve heard how watching Inside The Actors Studio inspired me to learn how actors came to excel so much at skills leaders in other areas of life work hard to achieve but rarely do. On top of that, many great actors on the show dropped out, were kicked out, or otherwise didn’t finish much school. Meanwhile, graduates of Ivy League[…] Keep reading →

A couple weeks ago I was in NYU’s “eLab,” a space that promotes entrepreneurship. Besides a few administrators who work there, it’s mostly students there, mainly connected with tech startups. That morning there weren’t many people there. I sat on a couch near the entrance and the staircase downstairs. Twenty or thirty feet away, across the open meeting area to my left, a few students worked on their laptops in[…] Keep reading →

“If lean startup methodology doesn’t work for you, then maybe you’re a candidate for the alternative method of company creation espoused by Joshua Spodek, entrepreneur, professor and coach at Columbia and NYU. Spodek explained his process to an enthusiastic and receptive audience at the Princeton Tech Meetup at the Princeton Public Library on July 16, in a talk titled “8 Steps from No Idea to Funding.”” So begins an article,[…] Keep reading →

Almost anyone who talked to me over the summer heard about how much I love the vegetables I’ve been getting through what they call Community Supported Agriculture. You pay a farm at the beginning of the season, then when the plants start growing, each week they deliver what’s ready that week. I go to a drop-off location a few blocks from my home and pick up my share. Once a[…] Keep reading →

Anyone can plan something. It’s harder to do it. If things went by plan they’d be easier. If you expected things to go by plan, you’d try more things. The problem is the unforeseen things and recovering from them. The more you can recover from unforeseen things, the more you’ll try. The more you try the more you’ll do. What can you recover from? How much can you recover from?

I’m honored and flattered to have been invited to speak at a friend’s gathering next Sunday, September 20th at her casual soirée in Chelsea, Manhattan, called a FED talk, like a TED talk but with home-made food. I’ll speak and lead exercises in entrepreneurial thinking and behavior, which I consider broader than just entrepreneurship. You can think and act entrepreneurially in a big company, or without funding or the intent[…] Keep reading →

Academia has some serious problems. I give a lot of talks to graduate students on what they can do after graduate school, though the following applies to undergraduates too. Many of them are worried about finding jobs. I grab their attention every time with this question: When I was getting my PhD in physics, I thought the only fields I could go into were academia to become a professor, industry[…] Keep reading →

A reader sent me an article in the New York Times called “Rethinking Work.” It began, “HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?” and continued about polls about job satisfaction and various people’s views on work, implying we should think about work differently—we like work less for money and more for intrinsic reward. The author is a psychology professor. Articles like this come out all the time. I’m glad academics[…] Keep reading →