The series of posts below covers creativity, mainly exploring counterproductive mainstream myths about it. I used to view “creativity” as vague, but a few sources dramatically and convincingly changed my perspective. One was a class at Columbia Business School called Systematic Creativity in Business, by Jacob Goldenberg. Creativity being systematic was designed to appear in the course name as a contradiction, but isn’t when you understand the material. His book[…] Keep reading →

If you don’t know Coco & Breezy, they are two rising stars with their own fashion line. Check out their page here. They started their company in their teens, moving to New York City from Minneapolis and have been growing since. Here’s an overview from the event announcement for their engagement Monday at NYU: The Entrepreneurship Special Interest Housing Floor invite entrepreneurs and fashion-minded alike to attend an evening with[…] Keep reading →

An attendee, David, at Friday’s talk at Harvard with GiveGetWin, spoke to me for a while before the event began and then after. He wrote the following Joshua’s talk at Harvard was wonderful. He masterfully dissected the process of decision-making and the influence it has on people’s lives. In less than 15 minutes he left me with enough to think about for a week. After the event we ended up[…] Keep reading →

Monday I spoke at NYU-Stern with a group called GiveGetWin on Leadership and Entrepreneurship. Judging by the number of attendees who asked questions and went out for drinks with us after, the event went great and they invited me to speak at Harvard today. Sorry for the last-minute notice, but I wasn’t sure I could make it work in my schedule. The details are that I’ll talk about leadership and[…] Keep reading →

I’ve learned to view what many people call failure as experience and lack of failure as not experimenting enough. If you avoid failure absolutely, I would guess I would sound annoying to me. Not that I’m special in this way. The entrepreneurial community celebrates failure, at least among those who learn from it despite the pain. So do sports and plenty of other places. A major part of my failures[…] Keep reading →

When you think about influencing or motivating someone in business, what tools do you think of using? How do you think of motivating people? Did you think of incentive-based tools based in authority, like bonuses, promotions, raises, increasing or decreasing someone’s responsibilities, threat of firing, threat of demotion, and the like? In my experience, most people do. Why not? We’re used to seeing them used. They work fairly predictably—almost nobody[…] Keep reading →

I hear similar reasons all the time that discourage would-be entrepreneurs from behaving entrepreneurially—starting business ventures, non-profits, or just projects they enjoy. This series helps you overcome the top ones I hear. Click on the entries in the Table of Contents to the left to see the posts in the series. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, but if it’s for you or your business, counterproductive myths don’t help you. Successful entrepreneurs[…] Keep reading →