Perhaps the best honor one person can give another is to understand them and continue their legacy. I’m writing today’s post to suggest you can do that with Martin Luther King more than you think. Many people believe Einstein got bad grades, but I understand he didn’t. Martin Luther King, Jr got bad grades. He started graduate school at a school near Philadelphia called Crozer. Note among his grades —[…] Keep reading →

As children we start defenseless. I don’t mean physically, though we start physically defenseless too. I mean kids don’t protect themselves from being emotionally hurt or having their identities challenged. Kids say things we adults recognize we would catch in mental filters before speaking. What mental filters? Everybody knows what I mean. As we get older we learn to protect our vulnerabilities. We learn protocol and manners. We learn how[…] Keep reading →

This post is about integrity and sticking with your values. A few years ago I visited my father in Ahmedabad, India, the country he has studied his professional life. We visited Gandhi’s ashram, a community where people who wanted to learn about and support him went. It still exists, though mainly as a static, historical site. It’s a humble place on the banks of a river, humbler than you’d expect[…] Keep reading →

Two days ago a guy named Satya Narayan Goenka died. Who was Goenka and why should I care? First, I’ll mention how I found out about him. I had no experience with meditation when a longtime friend I hadn’t seen in a while suggested I try it. The idea made no sense to me because meditation made no sense to me. I didn’t know or care about it to that[…] Keep reading →

Today being Labor Day makes it an interesting day to think about money. I’ve noticed my post “An essay on money” gets almost the most number of hits of all my posts so I re-read it periodically. (Speaking of money, today is the also the last day to get the early discount on my awesome seminar on September 21 and 22 — “Leadership Through Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence” so sign[…] 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.] Emotionally, I don’t want to do burpees nearly every single time I do them. As you probably know, I do twenty twice-daily. Starting is never easy.[…] Keep reading →

No two people are the same, especially centuries apart. Still, I can’t help but think about the leader of a great empire, occupying foreign lands, facing bankruptcy from an expensive victory in a war that galvanized many nations against it , taxing without representation, changing laws arbitrarily, putting his troops in people’s homes, with a legislative body insensitive to its citizens’ concerns, … I could go on, and ask “Who[…] Keep reading →

Is everyone familiar with this pattern? It doesn’t always happen, but a lot. If you want to make money, it helps to interact with other people who make money and join their community. But then when you end up making money, you have to keep interacting with them, maintaining your role in the community, which forces you to spend money. The cost of living that lifestyle eerily takes about as[…] Keep reading →

Let’s look at two former Harvard students from now and nearly two centuries ago. 176 years ago Henry Thoreau finished Harvard in 1837, one of its best-known students of his age. Let’s look at him before looking at this generation’s most prominent Harvard student. Thoreau wrote Walden, his treatise on living simply, escaping petty human affairs and gossip, appreciating nature, self-reliance, and such. He lived for two years mostly on[…] Keep reading →