In the midst of my series on Communication Skills Exercises, yesterday I worked with the brilliant, talented, and accomplished Nina Paley — free culture advocate, creator of Sita Sings the Blues, cartoonist of the insightful, funny, and subversive Mimi and Eunice, and friendly neighbor. We animated the Freedombox logos John Emerson and I worked on. She also does things like post blog entries titled “I am awesome,” suggesting an obvious[…] Keep reading →

(Some details TBD, but mark your calendars. The room is beautiful and centrally located. Please contact me with any questions. I’ll update details as they are determined.)   LEADERSHIP THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE At a time when businesses and business schools seek to learn from designers and design schools seek to prepare “students to be leaders in their professions and society”, cross-pollination between communities over common interests is as[…] Keep reading →

Here’s the mindmap for tonight’s Fred talk. Slightly evolved from my last one. Not everything made it into the presentation. Drag it around and click around. To navigate use arrow keys or click white space and drag to move the map click the ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icon at the top to resize the map click the “fit” icon at the top (to the right of the ‘-‘) to fit the[…] Keep reading →

This post continues my About page. Where to find more The best place to find more, besides contacting me, is one of my seminars or classes. If I haven’t posted about an upcoming one recently, check with me for something coming up. Here are some sources that have been influential or inspirational to me (just names of people and books now, I’ll put in links soon). Business Marshall Goldsmith –[…] Keep reading →

This post continues my About page. Topics This blog is about values, meaning, purpose, importance, passion, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence enabling you to develop yourself and improve your life through better understanding these things the underlying science, mostly evolutionary psychology, positive psychology, and cognitive behavioral therapy observations of the world arising from this perspective This blog’s perspective is founded on 1) my Model of the human emotional and motivational system[…] Keep reading →

Martha Graham, one of the great artists of the twentieth century — Picasso-level stature and influence in her field — entered my life late, in my 30s, when recording Julliard dancers for my art at Lincoln Center. They were perfect people to learn from, dancers actively learning her, describing a “Martha Graham revolution” I’d never heard of before. I’d feel bad about learning about her so late, but since then[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. 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.] Here are some basics to TRIZ. After the basics, I’ll interpret them. After examining all those patents, Altshuller and his team found that about 1,500 generalized solutions described all the specific solutions. Even simpler,[…] Keep reading →