In my seminar yesterday I mentioned “plays well with others” may be one of the most valuable skills in adulthood for team-based activities. Yet we treat it as a joke for children, or at best a euphemism implying the student in question doesn’t do well academically. Have you ever learned something amazing while developing yourself as a leader or person and wondered why leadership and personal development isn’t taught in[…] Keep reading →

Thanks to all who attended this weekend’s leadership and personal development seminar through Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York and Parsons the New School of Design. Thanks also to those who made it possible.

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. 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.] An example of an ineffective way to use willpower to get in shape is to will yourself to go to the gym two days a week for[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. 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.] How to use willpower summarizes the previous posts. Use willpower either for brief, self-contained projects that you’ll finish before running out of mental energy to sustain it[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. 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’s discussion of when not to use willpower — when you aren’t aware of where you are emotionally or where you want to or when you risk[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. 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.] If all you could do was act on whatever emotion was most dominant at any time, you would be purely reactive. You would not be able to[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. 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.] Understanding willpower requires understanding emotions functionally, so let’s start there. A functional perspective isn’t the only way to view emotions — exploring and communicating how they feel[…] Keep reading →