Freedom

Hold yourself accountable with precision. It gives you freedom.

Awareness / Fitness / Freedom

Hold yourself accountable with precision. It gives you freedom.

Do you stress over eating more than your want on the holidays? I found a great way not to that applies in many other places. Since getting more fit, I'm more sensitive to smaller changes in my fitness. When I used to have more fat, eating more than I wanted for a few meals didn't change much on my body. To go from having some fat to a little more fat didn't register. So I would eat more than I wanted. Now I notice the next morning or sometimes during the meal. The more precise your standards, the more you can stick to them because missing them becomes more obvious. You hold yourself more accountable without mental effort. This precision creates freedom because instead of…

December 10, 2014

Ethicist / Freedom / Nonjudgment / Tips

Non-judgmental Ethics Sunday: Sorry, No One’s Sitting There

Continuing my series of alternative responses to the New York Times column, The Ethicist, looking at the consequences of one's actions instead of imposing values on others, here is a take on today's post,"Sorry, No One's Sitting There." When my wife and I go to the movies, I typically buy a third reserved seat so I can keep the seat next to me empty. I prefer — but by no means need, either physically or psychologically — the extra space. My wife finds this new habit of mine rather absurd and extravagant. I agree. But is it unethical? WILL, AUSTIN, TEX. My Answer: This isn't an abstract issue. Your behavior affects other people. Instead of asking for an abstract judgment from outside parties like a…

November 23, 2014

Awareness / Freedom / Habits

Minimum effective behavior

Since my post, "The smallest effective difference," I've meant to list habits and practices I do to reduce my unnecessary effects on things. I plan to add to the list over time as I think of new ones since I feel like I act on the philosophy all the time and it seems short. If you have similar habits and practices, please let me know. The point of them is not to avoid polluting or waste, although I like those side effects. The point is mainly bringing simplicity, elegance, nuance, and awareness, which I find make life into art. Minimal but effective exercises like burpees Omitting needless words and using simple words Not taking long showers just because they feel good Turning off the light…

November 6, 2014

New SIDCHA series post

Education / Exercises / Fitness / Freedom / Habits / SIDCHAs / Tips

New SIDCHA series post

[I wrote a new introduction to my SIDCHA series. I'm happy enough with it to share it as a regular post.] Most people seem to want improve themselves, personally or professionally. Reading, watching, and listening to people tell you how you can develop yourself professionally or personally doesn't change anything beyond give you a bit of information. People don't succeed because they have more information. They succeed because they act. Even if you know you should do something, how do you know what? Marketers are trying to tell you what to do. They promote diets, exercise, how to start businesses, learning business skills, learning to become rich, learning languages, learning programming languages, religions, networking, and so on. It's bewildering. Each category has innumerable sub-categories. I…

October 30, 2014

Art / Audio / Freedom

Music to make a day enjoyable

A few years ago some TV producers almost picked me to be on their reality show. In the process they asked me what music I wanted them to play to represent me when I walked on camera. I came up with the songs below. With all I write about creating emotions, how have I not written about music, one of the greatest ways to create emotion? I guess because I don't play instruments or sing (except rarely, and then I love it), so it doesn't feel like something I actively create. I feel funny posting them because it doesn't feel like I'm actively sharing something you can't get elsewhere, which is why I took years to write such a simple post. These three songs forever…

October 29, 2014

Freedom / Habits / Leadership

Risks in relationships, rock-climbing, and ratcheting

Imagine rock climbing a vertical cliff. You don't want to get hurt so you use a rope to catch you if you fall. You regularly loop the rope through something attached to the face. I think they call it anchoring, so I'll call it anchoring too. How you anchor affects how you climb. If you just anchored yourself, your rope would effectively be attached right there, so if you let go or lost your grip you wouldn't fall. You're safe, assuming you used effective safety equipment. If you climbed two feet up from that anchor, your rope would be attached two feet below you, so if you let go or lost your grip you'd fall four feet. You're relatively less safe than when you just…

October 20, 2014

Choosing/Decision-Making / Freedom / Leadership

Eisenhower on deciding, resolving conflict, and uniting a divided team

People often ask me about resolving conflicts and how to handle them as a leader. This clip shows Eisenhower, played by Tom Selleck, handling a conflict two days before D-Day. It's dramatized, but not so much that we can't learn from it. Context Eisenhower and his team have been planning the Normandy invasion for months. They want to launch in the next couple days, but two major unknowns split to leaders on one aspect. The unknowns are the weather and the German army's preparations. The decision is whether to drop the elite paratroopers and gliders behind enemy lines the night before the amphibious invasion. Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance. There is no way to decrease the uncertainty. The Conflict Using these…

October 4, 2014

Freedom / Leadership / Nonjudgment

Handling leadership issues when you don’t have authority, follow-up

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a group I'm in with a leadership vacuum, "How to handle leadership issues when you don't have authority." Several people in that group wrote with appreciation for the message in that post. None wrote to say they had problems with it, though the person with authority did push back slightly. Then after an anonymous comment from an attendee of one of my seminars pointed out nearly all my examples of inspirational speeches came from men, I researched tons of speeches by women. One of them turned out related to my group's leadership vacuum, so I posted it to that group as a follow-up to my first message, which I copied below. Shortly after posting, I got a response…

September 7, 2014

Exercises / Fitness / Freedom / Habits / Tips

Cold Showers — The Series

I compiled most of my posts on cold showers into a series so you can easily read them at once. Click here to read it. If you think they're crazy, try them. At least start by reading the series. I couldn't imagine them being helpful before trying them, but I think they're incredible now.

September 5, 2014

Fitness / Freedom

Exploring boundaries means you cross them sometimes. But regrets pass.

I threw away some medals from some marathons I ran a few years ago during a stint of simplifying my life and getting rid of stuff. As far as I know, you can't get replacements. When getting rid of them I thought, "The joy and value of a marathon is in the running, the training, and the experience. A medal is just to show off to other people. I didn't run it for vanity." After getting rid of them, I regretted it. I crossed a boundary, but I only realized after I did it. But since then, I came back to my original view. The marathon was about running. Though I regretted getting rid of the medals for a while, in the long run it…

August 31, 2014

Awareness / Education / Freedom

Lessons in freedom and self-expression from a high school student in a project-based learning school

Kids often say things more clearly than adults. Actually, I think I should credit the insight below as much to inquiry-driven project-based learning as to the innocence of youth. Context: When I visited Science Leadership Academy last winter, a student led a tour of the school. A question came up about school uniforms, which the school didn't have. During the discussion on the topic, someone asked if any problems ever came up from students causing trouble by pushing limits on how they dressed. Our guide said no. Someone asked, "Really, why not?" She said, "We know that we can do it, so we don't have to." That perspective, to me, is a major piece of awareness, self-expression, and freedom: knowing you can do something but…

August 5, 2014

Six pack pic for accountability

Fitness / Freedom

Six pack pic for accountability

Scroll down for the picture I've held back from posting since this site is mostly about leadership, meaning, value, importance, purpose, emotional awareness, emotional skills, etc. First a few words. I find people's attitudes toward diet and exercise become self-righteous so I prefer not to bring up diet and exercise in conversation, so I'd generally not bring it up here. Plenty of sites show before and after pictures of people's fitness. My site isn't like theirs. But the more physically fit I get and the less effort I find it takes, the more valuable I find fitness. It feels great to become more fit. What do you have that you value more than your body? And if you believe, like I do, that your body…

July 27, 2014

Fitness / Freedom

The sadness of “I wish I could have a life like yours”

I've always wanted to experience the feeling of surfing when I'm skilled at it. Have you ever asked a surfer to describe it? They can't put it into words. I love skiing and playing ultimate. Surfing seems to have something similar, maybe more. So I've meant to learn for a long time. It turns out they teach surfing at the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, New York City, a subway ride from my home. After years of meaning to, I scheduled a lesson Friday morning. But I'm not writing about surfing. When I left my building as the sun rose, I ran into a neighbor who asked where I was going. I told him I was going to take a surfing lesson. He said, "I wish…

July 20, 2014

Education / Freedom

Op/ed Fridays: “Free speech zones” undermine free speech

Monday's opinion piece, "Turning College Into a No-Thought Zone,"described how a semi-public college in California created what it called "free-speech zones" where students could speak freely, disallowing some forms of speech everywhere else. The article contained this statement (sadly, to me, from someone else with a physics background): "The creation of the free-speech zones, and the enforcement of sound-level ordinances, was not to prevent free speech, but give religious or political speech a time, place, and manner that would allow speakers to address their messages to audiences on campuses without disrupting the other fundamental functions of the institutions," wrote a retired physics professor commenting on a Chronicle of Higher Education report. That was the purpose of the Constitution, to make the entire country a free-speech…

July 18, 2014

Awareness / Freedom

Everybody got made fun of and feels emotions from it today

Once as a kid after a getting a haircut, my classmates taunted me, "Josh got a haircut! Josh got a haircut!" I felt ashamed. I didn't want to get haircuts after that for fear of being teased. I didn't consciously realize until recently that decades later, I still feel a tinge of being teased when I think about getting my hair cut, even though I would never feel ashamed if someone tried to tease me about a haircut today. I wouldn't have thought about it except that it came up while I led a seminar on emotions and vulnerabilities. The experience came to mind as an example of how feelings we had as kids can still affect us today for events that wouldn't affect us…

July 5, 2014

Op/ed Fridays: Independence Day: Are we the British?

A few days ago the New York Times ran an article, "Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater," describing how mercenaries the U.S. hired were threatening to kill Americans after already killing Iraqis: weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor's operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater's top manager there issued a threat: "that he could kill" the government's chief investigator and "no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq," according to department reports. [...] "The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves," the investigator, Jean C. Richter,…

July 4, 2014

Freedom / Leadership

High status and living by your own rules: Jack Nicholson at the U.S. Open

A friend who grew up in Queens and became the senior ball boy at the U.S. Open told me a story about his friend who worked there too. One day he was working at the door to the U.S. Open's VIP room enforcing the jacket-and-tie dress code. Jack Nicholson came by and started walking into the room wearing shorts and a t-shirt. My friend's friend, following the rules, in a nervous high school student voice, said "I'm sorry Mr. Nicholson. There is a dress code and I'm afraid I have to ask you to follow it." With a polite laugh, Jack Nicholson said "I don't think so," and continued in. Lessons learned Today's post is about more than a dress code. It's about society's rules,…

June 26, 2014

Awareness / Education / Freedom / Leadership

Why is “know thyself” hard?

Why is "know thyself" hard? You'd think you'd know yourself better than anything. Here's a major reason why: because almost everyone in the world benefits from you not knowing yourself. Because organizations mediate your interactions with everyone in the world except the dozen or so people closest to youÂ and nearly all organizations benefit from you not knowing yourself. They benefit from manipulating you. Don't believe me? Think of the most influential organizations in the world---governments, religions, corporations, schools, etc. Each says it's right or the best or something like that and all others should be more like it. These claims are patently bogus. As much as each government says its history and people are the best, the others do too. They can't all be best.…

June 17, 2014

Thoughts on reading “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”

Thoughts on reading “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”

John Perkins and his peers described themselves as economic hit men. He wrote a memoir describing their work called "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," which I found thrilling to read and chilling to think about its consequences. What do economic hit men do? According to him Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as…

June 16, 2014

Art / Creativity / Freedom / Humor

Thoughts on reading Steve Martin’s memoir, “Born Standing Up”

I read and recommend Steve Martin's memoir, "Born Standing Up." He writes honestly and concisely. He persevered through a challenging life. Unlike many people we admire, he didn't overcome obstacles that befell him. My list of inspirations on my "Resources and Inspirations" page includes three big ones for me who overcame outside challenges that they couldn't have foreseen and have to handle---Victor Frankl, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Mark Zupan. Overcoming challenges is hard and brings out the best in some people. Steve Martin's challenges came from inside. He lived his passion without compromise---as challenging a task as overcoming an injury. As a comedian, that meant playing five to ten shows a week for years to empty rooms, handling hecklers, and barely making ends meet. It meant…

June 14, 2014

Awareness / Freedom / Nature

If someone tells you the world around you isn’t real or what you think it is, watch your wallet!

"The world you see is not what you think it is." How many organizations start with this philosophy? It piques your curiosity---"It isn't?"---to hear what comes next. The next step is the tricky one: "We'll tell you what it's really like." They rarely word it so bluntly, but many organizations start this way. For all I know they're right. What I do know is that once someone gets you to doubt your senses and awareness, they primed you to believe anything they say. I've meant to write this since the meditation retreat a few weeks ago. Though Buddhism is less intrusive than most major religions, it still rests on supernatural concepts like reincarnation and enlightenment. I didn't appreciate someone telling me if I didn't do…

June 8, 2014

Freedom / Nature / Tips

Know your emotions: jealousy isn’t envy

If someone wins the lottery or gets something you wish you had, would you feel jealous of them? No, you wouldn't. If you wish you had something someone else did, you would envy them, which is different from jealousy. Today people use the terms interchangeably, but they describe distinct feelings. I only learned the difference a few years ago when someone pointed it out to me. Since then I've become more aware of both emotions and they create fewer problems. That's the value of awareness. The more accurately you understand your motivations and emotions, the greater your emotional awareness and the more you can manage your life. I'm no expert on the emotions, but I've experienced them like anyone and I've developed skills to handle…

June 5, 2014

Clear your desk every afternoon, clear your mind every evening

Want to simplify your life? Try this: at the end of every day, clear your desk of all your work material. Think you can't do it? Try it. You'll be surprised at how much simpler it is than you think, and how much it affects your calmness when not at work. I've been doing it a few months. Before I did it I would have thought it would take too much time in the morning to get started and in the evening to wind things down. Or that it would force me to interrupt tasks in the middle. I haven't found those worries to materialize. On the contrary, I've found the practice gives me accountability. It forces me to think at a higher level about…

May 31, 2014

Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 2: how to improve

Awareness / Creativity / Freedom / Nature / Tips

Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 2: how to improve

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, None but our self can free our mind. -- Bob Marley, Redemption Song Context How do you move from living reactively, like in this graph, where you can't help but react to any intense motivation: To living aware and non-reactively like this, where you are aware of many motivations but don't feel compelled to react blindly to any? That change brings freedom. It comes from raising awareness and lowering compulsion to act on it. How to raise awareness by increasing your sensitivity to your motivations A motivation being subtle---that is, not intense---doesn't mean it's unimportant. On the contrary, often your most important motivations are subtle ones. How many people want to write books, paint, and so on, but never do…

May 28, 2014

Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 1

Creativity / Freedom / Models / Nature / Visualization

Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 1

Think of a time you reacted blindly. Did it go well? How do you feel about leaders who react without thinking or intuition? You don't want to react blindly---the opposite of leadership, since it means you're reacting to someone else, or unpredictable events in your environment, which I call blowing in the breeze. Most people understand the term "reactive" vaguely, so they can't do much about it. I find visualizing complex ideas helps me understand them. Visualizing reactivity Context: at any moment many things in your environment, body, and mind call for your attention and create motivations. You feel hunger and thirst, your boss yells at you, your kids yell for your attention, you remember you have to do your taxes, you want to go…

May 27, 2014

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