I didn’t always love performing. Before writing a sketch and performing in the sketch comedy class play in business school, called Follies, I avoided the stage. That performance experience became one of the most amazing, transformative experiences of my life. It opened me up to emotional awareness and expression beyond any expectations. I knew I would perform more, despite the anxiety the mere thought of it created. Taking Meisner technique[…] Keep reading →

The more I cook for myself, the more I appreciate nuance, subtlety, complexity, variety, and so forth in food, as well as the expression of the person who prepared the food. Also, the more I see others as stuck in the yummy phase, which describes the United States population increasingly in number and increasingly in areas beyond food. What’s the yummy phase? The urban dictionary defines it effectively: The period[…] Keep reading →

Tim Ferriss, bestselling author and marketer of The 4-Hour Workweek and follow-up “4-Hour” books, interviewed Martin Gibala, the scientist whose suggesting burpees as a candidate for the single best exercise in the New York Times in 2011 inspired my sidcha. Dr. Gibala’s book with Christopher Shulgan, The One Minute Workout, launches on February 7 (a week before my book, Leadership Step by Step!), which they talked mostly about, how to[…] Keep reading →

My Inc.com piece today, “The Declaration of Independence: The Best Entrepreneurial Document Ever?“, begins The Declaration of Independence: The Best Entrepreneurial Document Ever? Would you be happy for your venture to last a few years and make a few million? How about 240 years and 3 trillion dollars? Nobody pulled in Benjamins like Benjamin. Any entrepreneur who has written a business plan knows the challenge. For one thing it has so[…] Keep reading →

You know how valuable I consider sidchas. If you don’t have one, I recommend you create one or two for yourself. I’m working on sidcha.com so stay tuned. In the meantime, I thought about an app for sidchas. Here is my main thought. When you do something daily, you don’t have to keep track of it. You don’t have to compare your performance with your friends’. You don’t have to[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “My Inc. post today: Like TED Talks? This 99-Second Video Covers Them All,” begins: Like TED Talks? This 99-Second Video Covers Them All Everyone loves inspiration, so we enjoy TED talks. But do they change behavior or just make us feel inspired? Who doesn’t love feeling inspired? I do, so for a long time I loved TED talks. No longer. Why not? Because I distinguish[…] Keep reading →

I simplify complex or mysterious terms to make them easy to understand and act on. The professional and personal development fields seem to prefer click-bait titles—what sells over what works. Talk about failure and success is filled with clichés (“It’s the journey, not the destination,” “everything happens for a reason”) and grandstanding (“fail early and often,” “I failed many times before succeeding”) that I haven’t found helpful for someone facing[…] Keep reading →

Talk about leading people and a lot of people will talk to you about convincing people as a way of leading them. I recommend against this strategy. Convincing someone implies logically debating. Changing someone’s behavior means changing their motivations, which means changing their emotions. Logical argument evokes emotions of debate. Convincing motivates people to disagree. They also feel like you’re trying to impose your values on them. If you disagree[…] Keep reading →

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[…] Keep reading →