Yesterday began my fifth year of daily burpees, never missing one! I love the fitness they create. More importantly, the practice of integrity they create leads to me not skimping in other areas. My routine has expanded from ten burpees total to include stretching, back exercises, and ab exercises—one set in the morning, another set in the evening. I’ve also started other SIDCHAs. I’ve written before about their benefits, which[…] Keep reading →

A student in the online entrepreneurship course I’m creating asked about distractions. When he wants to work, he often gets distracted. I think me answer will help others so I’m sharing it here. Most life-long valuable things have long-term, non-urgent reward. Things that have immediate reward or urgency will distract. For example, if you want to do well at school, the reward for working on a project may come days[…] Keep reading →

If you read my blog you know that SIDCHA stands for self-imposed daily challenging healthy activity. I created the concept and write about it a lot. Considering its opposite helps illustrate their value and probably also reveals some problems in your life. The opposite of self-imposed is something others get you to do. The opposite of daily is irregularly. The opposite of challenging is easy. The opposite of healthy is[…] 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 →

[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 →

You are reading my two-thousandth blog post. Here’s the list of all of them. I’ve posted daily since January 2011, plus twice daily around my North Korea trips since that content seemed different. Why? I write for two main reasons, one related to content, the other to process. The content reason is that writing helps me develop thoughts and ideas. When I started I thought I’d run out of ideas.[…] Keep reading →

A reader wrote to ask about my August 2012 post, “Three things I learned from yoga” “With yoga you can use your body alone to create many emotions and learn how to handle them.” Have you written more about this? I can only see me creating fear, determination, calmness, anger and patience. These don’t count to many, so I wonder what other emotions could one create? I haven’t done yoga[…] Keep reading →