Many times daily in North Korea you see someone crouching doing nothing but passing time. Usually they’re alone, but sometimes in a group. I kept meaning to take pictures, but it feels funny to take a picture of someone doing nothing. I found the two below on the web. As best you can tell they’ve been squatting all day and will be for a while longer. They’ll be in a[…] Keep reading →

Between my talks and seminars and the university courses I’ve taught, I get to speak in public a fair amount. We all know one of the main challenges of public speaking is keeping the audience engaged — a bigger one being how to recapture an audience’s attention if you lose it. Here’s a trick that works every time. Although doing it can challenge you more than you think you can[…] Keep reading →

I mostly post pictures of cultural things like the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and millenia-old terracotta armies, but why not pictures of luxurious resorts I’ve indulged in? Maybe because the former are cultural and the resort in question — Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands — is commercial and makes its money from gambling? Maybe, but swimming in an infinity pool above Singapore also recalls when I swam across the Hudson River. And[…] Keep reading →

With all the news of the Higgs boson, you may have missed a big discovery in dark matter, a major remaining mystery of physics and astronomy. Most of the matter we can detect in the universe we can’t see directly. We can only see how it affects other things through gravity. Very mysterious! We have almost no way to constrain its properties besides gravity or experiment with it. Yet it[…] Keep reading →

Here is a deep question about values, spontaneity, risk, adventure, the best things in life, and your appetite for them. The context It begins with my mom’s garden years ago when she lived in Nebraska. Now I’m not that big on tomatoes, like some people are, and less so then than now. But when I tasted the cherry tomatoes from that garden they tasted like sunshine. I couldn’t believe how[…] Keep reading →

I played ultimate in Shanghai for the first time Monday and Saturday since the tournament in August in North Korea (in particular getting the end zone D and catching the goal to win the game), which was the first time in something like five years. Wow, nothing compares to playing ultimate. Even with probably 90 degree temperatures and high humidity, running around, throwing, and catching was awesome. It’s like what[…] Keep reading →

I wrote the other day about my six-month anniversary of burpees. A couple days before was a bigger anniversary — the tenth anniversary of Submedia’s Manhattan display in the PATH system. We launched June 18, 2002. I don’t write that much about Submedia here, the company I co-founded in the late 90s, but it still pays my bills and I still work on developing the technology, relationship, and other things[…] Keep reading →

Preface: I started writing this blog about how cutting personal costs (of any resource, including time, money, energy, attention, etc) improves your personal life. Rereading it I realized it overlapped so much with what leaders can do in business, I’ll tag it leadership too. Translating the post into business-speak I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. You can probably do it on the fly. People who know me in[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. 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.] Yesterday I started to consolidate posts on burpees but when I realized it was the day after the six month anniversary of starting doing them daily,[…] Keep reading →