People tell me they prefer personal stories and stories of humility, not just success. Well, this morning I messed up my fig tree. I'm still learning about gardening. I felt like a brute. Plus you can hear about my morning holocaust of bugs.
Hear me share on Paul Smith's Lead With a Story podcast how the company I co-founded, Submedia, locked me out of the office as the final nail of ousting me. More precisely, after ousting me from the CEO position, owing to Submedia's running out of money -- I won't argue it being a fair reason to switch CEOs -- the new team moved offices and didn't give me a key to the new one. There's more to the story and it took me over a decade to share it openly, to the extent I can share it. Paul Smith brought the story out from me in the episode of his podcast. If you enjoy hearing inside stories of a grown man brought to tears (not…
Genevieve Kim invited me to participate in her Eye See You project, a global project to photograph 1,000 strangers as a practice of seeing and being seen, in collaboration with The Assemblage NoMad (where we met), Ubuntu Market, Melissa Galeria, Invisible Technologies, BURNT, The Munchies Table and photographers around the world. Self-taught in photography, Genevieve has had her work appear in the NY Times, AdWeek, MOZAIC, Business Insider, UN Habitats and other publications. She says about the project, "More than a face, I want to know your story," which described the process. The shoot and interactions leading up to it were about sharing stories, which, I think, went into how she took the pictures. I'm honored to participate. Click here for all her portraits in…
I'm pleased to appear on Dan Zehner's Anthem of the Adventurer podcast. In a refreshing diversion from most of my recent podcast appearances, we talk about adventure, challenge, growth, and how to create them. Click to his site or listen below: His notes describe our conversation well: Episode Summary Today, we talk with Josh Spodek, who lives a life full of adventure while teaching at NYU. He's got some amazing ideas on how to incorporate adventure into your life without spending any money at all! Episode Notes I really enjoyed talking with Josh, and his personal statement on his blog just shows him best: I do what I love in life and do my best to cut out what I don't. Loving what you do…
I'm posting an audio story about why my post today is short. Basically a crazy person broke my computer laptop keyboard so I'm posting without a keyboard. Rather, I'm typing this on an NYU computer but don't know my complicated web page password so have to mail the text to myself so I can copy and paste it using only my mouse on my regular computer. It's hard posting using only a mouse.
My friend Marshall Goldsmith likes to hold his birthday parties at a piano bar called Don't Tell Mama in midtown. I quoted the following from an email to him and couldn't help sharing here. A moment broke out last night that I had to tell you about. I went to a park around the corner from my apartment to work on my laptop around 8 or 9pm. It's a tiny park, smaller than some Manhattan apartments. It happens to be across the street from the Stonewall Inn. Here's nearly the whole park from a picture I found online: It's near the 50th anniversary of the uprising so the West Village is upbeat and happy. The city or someone put a piano in the park when…
You may have read the empty boat parable. I don't much like it. I get its point, it sounds too contrived and fortune-cookie-like. The people who say it tend to sound new-agey, which is not a community I associate with. Yesterday morning, I experienced the point of the story without the contrivance. First I'll share the original for those who haven't read it. A young farmer laboriously paddled his boat up the river to deliver his produce to the village. It was a hot day, and he wanted to make his delivery and get home before dark. As he looked behind, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. He shouted,"Change direction! You are going to hit me!" to no avail - the…
Several TEDxNYU attendees agreed: "Nailed it!" My friend recorded it with her phone. It ran out of memory, but here are the first six minutes, followed by some stills. https://youtu.be/ZI8X4ba8sLc Word is that I have to wait 6 to 12 weeks for them to edit the video. I'll link to the full, official one when I get it.
You know you've wanted to see a TED talk live. Now's your chance. Cancel your old plans for next weekend. [NOTE: I will post the video of my talk here when the organizers finish editing and post it. They estimated 6 to 12 weeks from April 6 -- that is, likely late May or June.] See me and six other brilliant, engaging speakers this Saturday, April 6 at TEDxNYU---the intersection of two world-renowned institutions. This year's theme is Disruption. In NYU's Kimmel building, 60 Washington Square South, 10th floor, starting 10am. Get tickets and logistics here or contact me and I'll put you on my list. The speakers are listed here. See you there!
The winter is over and it's time to get outdoors running. Jessica Formoso covered me plogging on WNYW Fox 5 local news last night. You can hear my experience that made plogging stick: I cleaned where I live---my home. Here's the video, where you can see me running like an old man. Let me know if you want to join me for some plogging or if you plog on your own. What's plogging? The video explains it, but plogging means picking up litter while you run. I spoke about it on my podcast, episode 120: Rules for plogging in New York City. Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global quoted me on it in "17 Creative Weekend Routines For a Happier, More Successful Week," including plogging. More TV…
I couldn't help share Jia Jiang's sidcha. I've favored fitness sidchas like my burpee-based calisthenics, a mindfulness one in cold showers, and the expressive one of writing here. I've also described business ones like cold-calling five of sales leads daily or writing a business idea every day. There are aesthetic ones like drawing a picture every day or dancing every day. I also describe social ones like talking to a new person every day. He shared another social one. The video speaks for itself. https://youtu.be/-vZXgApsPCQ Normally I don't just like posting videos, but this one so perfectly illustrates how a sidcha works and their value, how could I not post it? He writes up each experience on his page. I wonder how much he kept…
"Fail early and often" "Fail forward" "Fail, fail, fail" The business world, especially around entrepreneurship, promotes failing as a way to learn. I recognize its inevitability and necessity for learning, but I suspect many people who promote it have never experienced devastating failure. I've failed huge in life and I wouldn't speak about it as cavalierly as many do. I consider physical injury inevitable in fitness and learning and I never hear people say "get injured early and often" or the like. Some of my failures Researchers ask people how long they think they can keep their hands in freezing cold water. Nearly everyone overestimates the time. They estimate minutes and then pull their hands out after a few seconds. Knowing your hand will feel…
I forgot to mention one of my most memorable experiences on my recent trip across the country: shooting guns. I'd never shot a handgun and had only shot a low-caliber rifle in North Korea. I learned a lot, as I'll describe below. From my train arriving in Houston, I caught a bus to an environmental research place. Before continuing with the story, I have to mention that most people I told I took a bus in Houston responded, "I've lived here ten years and never took the bus," or the like. Same when you tell Los Angeles people that you took the subway. Three things lined the highway from Houston to the research place: car dealers, fast food chains, and hotel chains. Plus one gun…
I'm on the train from Atlanta home to New York. I left October 29 and visited Chicago, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Diego, and New Orleans too. The impetus came from attending the Summit in L.A. I found reasons to visit places along the way. Here are 30 highlights an lowlights from the trip. 1. I traveled intercity only by train and bus since I'm not flying. 2. At the Summit I spoke to several world-renowned people, establishing relationships, and taking steps to record conversations with them for Leadership and the Environment. They're bestsellers, TED speakers with collectively over 150 million views. 3. I got a guided tour of Patagonia's headquarters, which Leadership and the Environment guest Vincent Stanley set up. Their culture is incredible and…
I hear and read the term white privilege. Plenty of people explain it. How do the following fit into the concept? For context, for about a decade of my childhood, my mom's house, where I spent half my time, was in poor neighborhoods, especially Rockland Street in Philadelphia in the mid-70s, or bordered them where whites were minorities. For a while our house was one of three white families on a block with maybe fifty houses. Other kids (non-white, if it matters) called me "honkey"---kids I didn't know. That is, kids would shout it at me across the street. Once, waiting for a bus home from high school with friends amid a lot of other people, a band of maybe half a dozen other kids…
In my ongoing efforts to be burdened with less material stuff, I've scanned many of my old photographs so I could get rid of the physical pictures. Now that I can see the images on my screen when I want, I'm not sure what to do with them besides sending them to a landfill, sadly, but I caused the physical waste when I paid for the pictures. I'm only moving it from one place to another now. For those keeping track, I still haven't thrown out my landfill waste since June 2017, so some of my trash this year dates to the 70s---for example, here's the story leading to the picture below. In the winter of 1979-80, my father took my two sisters and I…
On Saturday, August 9, 2008, I left my apartment first thing in the morning after watching the Olympics opening ceremony at a bar with friends the night before, walked to my friend Dave's apartment, caught a ferry to New Jersey, and swam across the Hudson River back to Manhattan. Then we walked back shirtless and shoeless from 45th Street to Greenwich Village. You've seen the picture at the top of my blog and mailings of me doing the backstroke with Hoboken and Jersey City behind me, Manhattan ahead. I chose it to represent a person's ability to cross their Rubicon independently. You don't need others' permission, resources, etc. Here's the full image. We swam about a mile, which probably took us about an hour. The…
In college in the late 80s, amid a global movement to avoid doing business with companies doing business with apartheid South Africa, I stopped buying Coca-cola products. Years later, Mandela became president and my conscience felt clear about buying their products. They make a lot of products, so I had to research all their stuff. I thought, I remember why I stopped drinking coke, but I don't remember why I started in the first place. I couldn't think of a satisfying answer so never restarted. I don't think I've had a coke product since. Soon after I stopped drinking any sodas, sweetened or not. I think I may have drunk Minute Maid products before finding out how deceptive they are, as I wrote in When…
I've been exercising more than usual for the past few months, amid travel. You might say I haven't given my body time to recover, and I probably haven't, but I find it glorious. This episode explains why. It's about Fitness Travel Lego Eating Burpees Sidchas Discipline Diligence Resilience Lugubriousness Struggle Glory and so on.
You often have to choose between options without enough information. How do you choose? You can never know everything you want for all life choices, yet you can't avoid acting. Today I'm posting my answer by audio. I start with a story of a student with just such a challenge and show what we can learn from situations like them. I consider these lessons among the greatest one can learn.
When I last ate meat in 1990, maybe 1989, I tried to persuade others to stop too. I just ended up in arguments. Since then, I've come to appreciate more views on the practice. I don't see it as right, wrong, good, or bad. In fact, I get annoyed by people who try to impose their values on eating meat on others even if I share those values. (I see reason to intervene on factory farming, animal cruelty, and a few related issues that affect others, though I haven't made them my battle.) Eating meat is an environmental issue for the pollution it causes and resources it depletes, though I see the issue rooted in human population. If the planet had 1 billion people, the…
Having started my Leadership and the Environment podcast, I'd meant to record audio posts for my blog. Today is my first foray. Just after the solstice, I find myself at Equinox, the gym, comparing the luxury experience to bare bones.
Enron Environmentalism Enron looked profitable when it compartmentalized and hid its losses. Do you compartmentalize and hide your pollution? I just had lunch with a man who described himself as fanatical about the environment--in particular, about water bottles. He illustrated by describing how fastidiously he handled them. As he started his story, I expected him to describe how he never used water bottles. Americans have such clean and drinkable water that water made unclean makes front page news for weeks. Specifically, he lives near Manhattan, and our water wins blind taste tests with consumers. The EPA finds it meets or exceeds all safety requirements. I figured he knew that 91% of plastic isn't recycled, and that for the garbage you create, 70 times more was produced upstream. So I presumed he would describe how he never used these harmful,…
My LinkedIn post today, "Would you give a friend heroin?," began Would you give a friend heroin? A few months ago the host of a podcast I was on sent me a package of brownies to thank me for appearing on his show. The brownies were prepackaged and looked like this: A younger me would have eaten them right away. My longtime readers know several reasons I wouldn't eat them. First, they are packaged—two or three times, actually: the plastic you see and the box plus wrapping. I avoid packaged food. Second, they have plenty of ingredients whose fiber has been removed, including sugar, oil, and enriched flour. I avoid fiber-removed food. Third, I avoid animal products like eggs and dairy. I've learned not to give puppies as gifts and he…
Let me start by stating clearly that I don't like Roy Moore---his politics, his history, his behavior, the people he associates with, or anything I've learned about him. I probably want him out as much as anyone. I hope he and his supporters lose, but not through vigilante tactics. 1989: Donald Trump, tough on crime If you haven't watched the Ken Burns documentary, The Central Park Five, I recommend it. The New York Times rated it one of the top documentaries of 2012, when it came out. It's about the case of the Central Park Jogger and the five boys convicted. While jogging in the park in the spring of 1989, she was knocked down, dragged or chased nearly 300 feet, violently assaulted, stabbed five…