Every system of leadership, professional development, and personal development I’ve heard of has some concept of raising your self-awareness. “Know thyself.” “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Acting on the advice isn’t easy for many. Today I’ll post some tips. Generally knowing yourself means knowing your motivations, values, what you find meaningful, and so on. I find all these things are rooted in your emotions. The more you understand[…] Keep reading →

Do you have trouble making habits stick? Come to my seminar one month from today! Hosted by the Columbia Business School Alumni Club and NYU-Stern, I gave this seminar at NYU last month and people loved it. They learned things about themselves and about each other that made habits click for the first time. Date: Sunday, June 14, noon to 4pm Location: NYU-Stern, 40 West Fourth Street Whom better to[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been avoiding buying food with any packaging. I started April 20. I updated my progress with pictures in “Buying no food with packaging, eighteen days and counting“. Saturday evening I bought some onions in one of those net bags. Onions make you cry. Today I’m scheduled to get a shipment of vegetables from my farm share and that comes in a box so the experiment would have ended today[…] Keep reading →

Following up yesterday’s post, “The basics: more simple and valuable than you think” about how the masters tend to focus on basics, I found a series of videos made by a great basketball player, Michael Jordan. He’s made few instructional videos. He could do things no one else could and made them look easy. He can teach anything he wants. So what does he teach? Simple basics. Things like getting[…] Keep reading →

A friend and colleague visited a couple weeks ago. He invited me to breakfast with another friend of his who happened to be an incredibly successful founder and CEO of a business related to a project of mine. You don’t expect to make such valuable connections. We made a great connection and may find ways to collaborate. I met the visiting friend in the first place through another guy I[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I compared emotions to fire and pain—things we don’t enjoy feeling but we can use to improve our lives if we know how to use them. Calling them negative leads us to suppress and deny them—the opposite of self-awareness—which takes away our ability to improve our lives. I call that counterproductive. I think sharp knives might make a more helpful analogy. I might call sharp knives negative if I[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on principles to create ideas people want to help you with and creating a helpful, supportive community around you. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view that series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] You wouldn’t believe how much access you have to people, both the number of people and how[…] Keep reading →