A recent conversation with a friend who also coaches highlighted some important observations of mastering your emotions and improving your life. We were talking about my Model and Method and how you can predictably and consistently create the emotions and motivations you want. He described how he started putting this stuff into practice. He had learned techniques to change emotions — basically to choose new environments, beliefs, and behaviors. He[…] Keep reading →

I just read this article, “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, Consider Time.” Before commenting on it, I’ll note that I saw it linked to from a tech site, Hacker News. That community tends not to value MBA values and view people with MBAs as not adding the value engineers do. Having been a tech-founder (before my MBA) and a non-tech-founder (after my MBA) of different ventures I understand that[…] Keep reading →

The pattern: overly intense emotions We’ve all experienced someone losing their cool around us. People flip out. They scream or raise their voices. Or, alternatively, sometimes they withdraw and act depressed or powerless. They make rash decisions. They get difficult to be around, etc. Sometimes you’re the one whose emotions get out of control. Some people describe the pattern as “being emotional.” Since I say people are always feeling emotions[…] Keep reading →

Life is full of difficult decisions. People struggle over them, sometimes for years, even people living great lives. You probably have one or two or more. I’ve had my share. A couple questions people asked me recently got me to figure it out. If your questions are reasonably similar, read on. Typical life questions “Which job should I take?” “Should we become boyfriend and girlfriend?” A couple friends asked me[…] Keep reading →

What a coincidence. The day after my long post on the counterproductivity of moralizing for leading people, using the example of deciding for others whether they should eat meat or not, the New York Times published the results of a contest to do exactly what I described as counterproductive. No contradiction here — the New York Times’s goal is not to lead people, but to sell newspapers and what works[…] Keep reading →

Is there anything as annoying as someone who exhibits traits you used to have, you’ve done your best to get rid of, but still have in you? It cuts to your core. I spent a week and a half with a guy who had traits the rest of the group all had gotten over a know-it-all couldn’t help butting into conversations interrupting always had to point out what he knew[…] Keep reading →

My closing paragraphs on yesterday’s post, anticipating people’s reaction, got me thinking about Marshall Goldsmith, one of today’s top business thinkers (and a friend). I wrote the following: By now, many of you are probably thinking “we’ve solved all the problems so far, we’ll solve the ones to come” “since before Malthus scientists project doomsday and they never happen, we can ignore this” or “this won’t affect me” If so,[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written about the Do The Math blog, which looks at the numbers underlying how our economy works, particularly the energy part, which is to say, what drives it. If you think something else drives it, do the math! I think you’ll see otherwise. Incidentally, analysis like his is one of the reasons I studied physics (if you didn’t know, I got a PhD in the subject) — to understand[…] Keep reading →

Sometimes you recognize something you learned as a great life lesson. Sometimes what you thought was a great life lesson turns out not to be. How can you tell them apart? I’ve found that the more meaningful a life lesson, the more trivial it sounds when you explain it to someone else. For example, I went to North Korea and saw people living under different conditions than anyplace else, yet[…] Keep reading →