Would you feel weird to eat the peel of an orange? I don’t know about you, but I would have thought people would consider me weird to peel an orange and then eat any of the peel. It turns out the peel has most of the fruit’s vitamin C, nearly all of its fiber, a decent amount of calcium, and almost no calories. It’s healthy and comes free with the[…] Keep reading →

Sorry if I’m straying too far from leadership, meaning, value, importance, and purpose, but I find food, eating, and physical fitness an increasingly important part of personal leadership the closer my diet consists of fresh fruit, vegetables, and legumes. Today someone took me to lunch at a nice natural foods restaurant in Soho, Manhattan. His company was paying for it so I didn’t have to think about price. I ordered[…] Keep reading →

You have two options in life. Option 1 is to try, meaning actively trying at things that matter to you. If you try, things won’t always work as you want and you will sometimes feel bad. Not bad like your fell and scraped your knee. Bad like what’s-the-point?-Every-time-I-try-I-fail-so-why-keep-trying?-Why-bother-going-on-at-all?-I’m-a-failure-and-always-will-be bad. As far as I know, feeling that way is inevitable if you try. Option 2 is to eat cookies and ice[…] Keep reading →

In college and graduate school I held academia in high regard, mainly because I valued education and learning. Spending time outside academia showed me how much education and learning happens outside academia. Returning to academia showed me that people in it don’t all keep learning that much. And what schools teach isn’t always that useful. Since I played sports all through college and graduate school, I also conflated academics and[…] Keep reading →

I’m not going to claim my time was fast, but I’m happy enough with coming in second in my age / sex group in a small five-kilometer run NYU hosted yesterday and tenth overall that I can’t help posting about it. I’m not bragging. The race didn’t have meaningful competition: I finished several minutes behind the winner and there were only 127 runners, many of whom walked most of it,[…] Keep reading →

It must be one of the most profitable innovations ever: to remove the nutritional part of foods and selling the mostly sugar that remains. Fruit juice, table sugar, white flour, corn syrup, agave nectar, and so on. What’s left tastes sweeter. It lasts longer on the shelf because it lacks nutrition for the life forms that would decompose it. It motivates people to consume more of it. Without fiber, it[…] Keep reading →

An attendee at my Harvard talk wrote me about his starting a couple Sidchas. I asked him if I could share his experience because it illustrates how we grow when we challenge ourselves. Making a challenging daily habit stick not easy, but I find that knowing that others face the same obstacles and that overcoming them is just as hard for everyone else makes it easier. You’ll also see that[…] Keep reading →

I think you’ll like what I wrote about food to someone who wrote: I’ve been looking for something like this [to learn to cook, in balance with my work] in my life, but what’s a good place to start learning how to cook? I’m a young single dude in his 20s, and the most I can do is boil some pasta. I work from home so time is not really[…] Keep reading →

[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.] A year and a half ago I spoke at Harvard on not dwelling on decisions (and at MIT a couple days later) with my friend’s non-profit, GiveGetWin, that[…] Keep reading →