Freedom

Choosing/Decision-Making / Freedom / Tips

How to worry less? WINDETIT!

This summer's #1 bestselling business book, Triggers, by Marshall Goldsmith, describes how not to worry about things not worth worrying about. I'm going to improve what he wrote. He created an acronym, AIWATT, which he rhymes with "say what," short for the first six words of this question: Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? If you are not willing to do anything about something and you are aware that you aren't willing to act, then you will see no point in worrying about it. Instead you'll concern yourself with things you can act on. If you're willing to act but also realize your actions won't make a difference, or if they'll make…

September 2, 2015

A reader simplifies his life. You can too.

Awareness / Choosing/Decision-Making / Freedom

A reader simplifies his life. You can too.

My colleague and friend, Tim Francis, whose online course I took and loved on moving a business online, told me about how simplifying his life is improving it. I sent him a link to my post, "Less, please," which got him looking at his bookshelf. In a few minutes he went from describing the books' value to questioning it to seeing value in the freedom of not books and putting them back in to circulation for others. Everyone goes through the usual questions and protestations of "But what if I need to look something up?" and "But how will my friends know the awesomeness of my reading history?" Ultimately, only by getting rid of a few books do we realize the freedom of not books.…

September 1, 2015

Choosing/Decision-Making / Fitness / Freedom / Habits

I’m lucky: I put on fat immediately and lose it slowly

"He's so lucky! He never puts on weight!" "She's so lucky! She loses weight so fast!" I hear people say things like that all the time. If I eat one unhealthy meal, I can see it on my belly. But then even after running a marathon I don't see that fat go away. Fat goes on immediately and takes a long time and a lot of work to get off. I'm lucky! I'm lucky I put on fat fast if I overeat and lose it slowly because it means I have to make fitness a way of life, not something I sometimes do. Doing something sometimes instead of consistently adds choice, which means you can choose not to do it. Dieting correlates with lack of…

August 29, 2015

Lessons in leadership from Frances Hesselbein, part 1

Education / Freedom / Leadership

Lessons in leadership from Frances Hesselbein, part 1

"To serve is to live." Frances Hesselbein had the fastest, clearest, most direct, and most meaningful answer of anyone I remember asking her passion. Five minutes into our pre-lunch conversation and she went right to the point. Experience and, I believe, only experience enables people to encapsulate great meaning in a minimum of words. I was immediately struck by the power and meaning in these few short words: "to serve is to live." If you read her writings, you see these five words a lot, but they carry more meaning when she says them directly after you ask her passion. Most of the next couple hours' conversation was reviewing and approaching the words from different perspectives. I knew many people call her the best leader…

August 20, 2015

Awareness / Freedom

Op/Ed Fridays: The misunderstanding behind “There ought to be a law against hate”

I read with sorrow and disdain a New York Times editorial the other day, "There Ought to Be a Law Against Hate." I feel compassion for a man who lost a mother to a neo-Nazi, but don't agree with him about outlawing a human emotion. The part I object to most is the title, that there should be a law against hate. Hate is an emotion that all humans have. It arises involuntarily. We have it because we inherited it from our ancestors. They have it because it evolved. No emotion is absolutely good, bad, or evil on its own. Even if you believe it is, not everyone agrees with you. You say you're right and they're wrong? They say the same in reverse. Why…

July 31, 2015

Creativity / Education / Freedom / Stories

Learning to communicate beyond words and talking

I once read that the difference between activities that cool kids do and uncool kids do is that uncool kids' activities tend to be based in rules and cool kids' less so. I don't know how you'd verify the idea, but I found exploring it told me about myself. Uncool kids play chess, which has clear rules. You can count the possible states. Cool kids play football. Football has rules, but loosely describing the boundaries, not the state of play. Football players shine when the strategy falls apart and they have to improvise. Uncool kids dance partner dances with structured rules. Cool kids dance more free style and make things up as they go. A lot of structured partner dances probably emerged from cool kids'…

July 28, 2015

Awareness / Freedom / Perception / Tips

How to live a life of luxury and indulgence

My mom grew up on a farm. I forget the details, but she said the family of six would have about a pound of meat for a meal (or maybe for a week). Dessert would be an apple. Americans today routinely eat over a pound of meat in one meal and turn down apples in favor of sweetened delicacies only royalty enjoyed a few generations ago. Poor Americans today have televisions, smart phones, and so on. They're cheap because we mass produce them, but a few generations ago any television was a luxury. I looked up luxury and found a few definitions. Consider these two: n. Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort. a material object, service, etc., conducive to sumptuous living, usually a…

July 9, 2015

Fitness / Freedom / Leadership

July 4, 1939: “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth”

Lou Gehrig was one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century. He died in his prime from the disease often named after him. On July 4, 1939, he gave his retirement speech, which I copied below. Some career highlights from Wikipedia: He was an All-Star seven consecutive times, a Triple Crown winner once, an American League (AL) Most Valuable Player twice, and a member of six World Series champion teams. He had a lifetime .340 batting average, .632 slugging average, and a .447 on base average. He hit 493 home runs and had 1,995 runs batted in (RBI). He had a rare disease we now call ALS, which results in rapidly increasing paralysis, difficulty in swallowing and speaking, and a life expectancy of less…

July 4, 2015

First empty inbox in at least a year!

Freedom / Habits

First empty inbox in at least a year!

Simplicity, structure, and useful habits keep unimportant things from distracting you and allow you to focus on what you want, which makes life fun and rewarding. They give you mental freedom. When I met David Allen he described how the structure of his processes in his book Getting Things Done create freedom, not just make you more productive. I follow them with my adjustments that I wrote up here, and recommend them. I don't try to keep my inbox empty because I sometimes have emails that take a while to respond to. I do clean off my desk every night, though. I try to keep it to around five at most. Sometimes the last one or two are hard to get rid of before another…

June 29, 2015

Education / Freedom

Can you tell me about John Taylor Gatto?

Most Sundays I comment on The New York Times' Sunday Magazine column The Ethicist. This week looks like they have a special issue without it. Normally I comment on one from their archives, but today I'm so caught up in a couple videos I watched, and I believe I have a fair number of educators who question the system, that I'd love to learn if people can give me background on John Taylor Gatto. So far I watched this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkT0k57tAHo and this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KlSD0nanco and I plan to watch more. His subject---education as a system and its results as opposed to our desired results, also what is most valuable to educate---is close to my main goals today. He also sounds like my uncle from…

June 7, 2015

Exercises / Fitness / Freedom / Leadership / Nature / SIDCHAs

Have you striven for excellence?

Have you put everything you had into something? Have you tried as hard as you possibly could? Have you run until you dropped? Skied as fast as you possibly could, risking injury? Decided to lift a weight you couldn't conceive of lifting and done it? Have you run sprints in the rain, alone? Have you put your name and reputation on the line for all time? Have you said no to things anyone would say yes to because the sacrifice was worth it? Have you doubted everything you thought was right because your experience taught you things school never could have taught you? Have you risked bankruptcy, friendships, jobs, your home? Have you put yourself into the unknown so deep you didn't know if you…

June 6, 2015

Creativity / Freedom / Habits / Leadership / Models

The progression of performance-based skills

Any performance-based skill development follows a similar pattern. I'll describe it for playing guitar, but it follows for leading, acting, sports, any other musical instrument, singing, etc. The instrument: First you have to learn the instrument. If you don't know its parts and how it's assembled, you can't do anything with it. Your skill: Next you have to learn how to move your fingers. You can't play music until you know scales or chords. The music: Only when you can take for granted how to move your fingers without thinking about them can you play music. Your feelings: Only when you know the piece you're playing well enough can you express yourself through it. Until now, you're playing mechanically. Now you can express yourself. You…

April 28, 2015

Freedom / Leadership

Why the rules of government prevent people who want to govern from doing what they want

The more I work with leaders and leadership, the more I distinguish between The skills to lead and The authority to coerce people to comply The more I look at concentrations of authority---mainly titled positions in corporations and government---the more I see people interested in the second who aren't interested in the first. I used to think the main purpose of the Constitution was to describe how to run the government. I'm increasingly seeing it as a way to prevent people looking for authority from getting what they want and limiting them when they do. I learned in grade school how the framers reacted to the tyranny of the king but mainly as history. Now that I see people with authority acting on it, sometimes…

April 25, 2015

Peace versus personal freedom

I'm not sure how to resolve this, or if anyone can. Some people enjoy fighting, even war. The more freedom you give people, the more freedom they have to promote fighting, which seems to decrease peace. Some say things like "Your freedom ends where mine begins," suggesting that laws regulate behavior that affects others. Still, belligerent people can democratically influence the law to allow more fighting. And wars involve people in other countries, whom the law doesn't apply to. Others point to education as a solution, saying that the more we educate people the less they'll resolve difference through fighting. I guess that's possible, but it has an air of "I'm right. If you knew more you'd realize I'm right too." I don't find people…

April 18, 2015

Awareness / Choosing/Decision-Making / Education / Freedom / Habits

If you have “too much to do” or “not enough time,” you’re not getting more done. You’re annoying.

I first noticed it in the last semester of business school when most students were complaining about having to choose between job offers. All the offers more than met their standards. Dwelling in their decisions instead of choosing and living their lives made them miserable instead of enjoying themselves. What made them miserable wasn't that they had multiple offers---that is, the problem didn't come from outside. The problem was their inability to choose, which came from a lack of skill, discipline, self-awareness, or something like that. Schools offer tons of so-called opportunities to lead---student-run clubs, student governance, etc. Many people think "Community is better than not community, so I should sign up." Later they move to "Showing leadership is better than not showing leadership, so…

April 14, 2015

Exercises / Fitness / Freedom / Habits / SIDCHAs

Run on solid ground

Why do I talk about my daily habits so much? I was talking to a friend yesterday about them. She told me she didn't get to exercise as much as she'd like, especially in busy times, and asked how I found time to exercise and write every day. I asked how she got anything done without a daily routine. A daily routine gives you and your day structure. Losing that structure, makes it easier to lose track of your values, rushing to do whatever apparently important thing appears before you, doing a lot of work, getting little done. I call that blowing in the breeze. A daily routine that forces you to think puts things in perspective by giving you standard criteria to measure other…

April 8, 2015

The great masters of speaking with authentic voices

Awareness / Exercises / Freedom / Humor / Leadership

The great masters of speaking with authentic voices

Following up yesterday's post's exercise for how to speak authentically, I wanted to give a couple more examples illustrating mastery of speaking authentically. People who speak authentically can say things others can't, meaning they have more freedom. We respect them not for their technical mastery of some craft but that they speak without that. A great master today is Charles Barkley, whom I wrote about the other day. He's famous for speaking about race, sex, class, and other topics many people lose their jobs for, yet people don't condemn him. They recognize he's sharing something about himself, not imposing his values on others. He leads people to accept him instead of judging him. The video below shows a different authenticity. Note the vulnerability he shows…

March 25, 2015

Freedom, from speech

Exercises / Fitness / Freedom / Habits / Leadership / SIDCHAs

Freedom, from speech

You have opinions about race, sex, homosexuality, class, politics, and other controversial topics. You probably only talk about them with people closest to you. Most of us won't touch them with a ten-foot pole, knowing how one public statement can destroy a life. We believe we don't have that freedom. If you don't believe you have it, you can't do it. How about talking about them to the media for twenty years and being loved for it. That's freedom. This article about Charles Barkley described him as Off the court, where he spun quotes and welcomed controversy, Barkley was arguably the most interesting and influential athlete of his time — maybe since Ali. While others packaged themselves as though they were just another product to…

March 21, 2015

A quarter century of Free Software

Nowadays that GNU/Linux just works and Apple doesn't, at least from what my friends tell me about their laptops and phones, it's simple to get a computer running on GNU/Linux. It wasn't always that way. In 1996, when I first installed GNU/Linux on a computer, it took weeks to figure out how. By contrast, a recent time I installed it on a laptop, the guy with the laptop remarked that it got some hardware working that Windows didn't. Business school without using Microsoft products, especially Excel, wasn't as hard as I expected. My classmates asked me why I avoided using Microsoft or Apple. I had learned the principles of Free Software in graduate school for physics and found them compelling. I learned them enough to…

March 17, 2015

Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours

Exercises / Freedom / Habits / Leadership / Models / Tips

Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours

[EDIT February 2020: I gathered, edited, and compiled all the posts I listed below into my book ReModel, which I recommend if you prefer a more curated experience with less clicking. Either way, I recommend doing the exercise. It gives a new way of seeing the world that costs nothing and takes little time.] This series covers my doing my Write Your Beliefs exercise, which I've found one of the more valuable self-awareness exercises that my clients, my students, and I have done. It builds on the Inner Monologue exercise, which I also call "The most effective self-awareness exercise I know." The first entry motivates the value of this exercise, the second describes the exercise, the third and fourth describe my experience doing the exercise,…

February 13, 2015

Audio / Freedom / Leadership / Nonjudgment

Malcolm X speaking

This year for Martin Luther King day I listened to two recordings of Malcolm X speaking, posted by WNYC in "Remembering Malcolm X: Rare Interviews and Audio." I recommend listening. People accuse him of racism and inciting violence, but to hear him speak and to hear people who knew him speak about him, it's hard not to feel those critics missed the essence of what he said, and that they neglected to criticize the people and institutions he criticized, which were, and remain, racist and violent. He spoke so clearly and plainly about subjects so few people do, I can't think of anyone today who speaks like that today. I'd love to hear of someone I'm missing. It seems to me he spoke more about…

January 19, 2015

After Innocence: a documentary painful to watch and recommended

Art / Freedom / Nonjudgment

After Innocence: a documentary painful to watch and recommended

Many people associate due process and rights of the accused with being soft on crime and coddling criminals. The documentary After Innocence tells the stories of several completely innocent men falsely jailed for a variety of reasons and the organization, The Innocence Project, devoted to helping them. I recommend it, though it's at times painful and may infuriate you. The movie won many awards, including a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. At one point, a prosecutor in Florida argues to a judge to keep a man in jail despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, against his earlier arguments. He presents himself as playing things safe, but he's keeping the actual criminal at large, keeping the actual criminal safe. It's hard not to wonder how this…

January 10, 2015

Freedom / Leadership

Op/Ed Fridays: Serpico on cops today

News of shootings, grand juries, protests, and more involving race, class, and gender are making front-page news like they haven't in decades. I try to stick to posting original perspectives and ideas, but sometimes I find something relevant I feel compelled to link to. Frank Serpico, the real-life cop Al Pacino played in the movie Serpico, wrote a piece "The Police Are Still Out of Control, I should know," I found relevant from someone with a valuable, unique, and credible perspective. He had the integrity to try to reform the corruption in a system he cared about, taking a bullet to the face in the process. I'll quote the article's beginning here, which talks about decades ago, but its poignancy comes from his views on…

January 9, 2015

More inspirational SIDCHA videos

Art / Creativity / Freedom / Habits / SIDCHAs

More inspirational SIDCHA videos

[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.] Here are two videos of people who learned to dance by doing it every day. So much more photogenic than burpees and writing here daily. I don't know about you, but watching them brings tears to my eyes. I suggest seeing these videos not about dancing but about freedom and joy achieved through mastery. Recognition from peers and the public comes with it. And about the effectiveness of Self-imposed daily challenging healthy activities (SIDCHAs). This video has almost five million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w This…

December 23, 2014

Rappelling down a three-story wall!

Exercises / Fitness / Freedom

Rappelling down a three-story wall!

My friend Dave got tickets to a rappelling class over the weekend. It may not have much to do with what I normally write about, but I can't help sharing some pictures. Come to think of it, people do courses like these as part of leadership training. Taking that first step off the platform to where only a rope was holding you up, and that rope wasn't tied around you, it only loosely looped through a metal piece attached to your waist, was scary. I recommend the activity to anyone. It's easier than you expect and fun. I did it in Brooklyn with Hollywood Stunts. They were professional and fun, so I recommend them. Pictures The light was low so not many pictures came out.…

December 17, 2014

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