[This post is part of a series on The Model — my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development — which I find the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get[…] Keep reading →

The media continue with their “great man” model of leadership with regard to Kim Jong Un’s succession. They imply if things are happening, the person in the leadership position must be making them happen. I think a systems perspective more accurately describes the situation. For example, today’s New York Times describes him becoming “supreme commander” of the military, signaling that his succession is moving forward unimpeded. They imply some chance[…] Keep reading →

To follow up the talk I organized for Srikumar Rao, Srikumar’s business manager offered deep discounts (almost half price) for members of the Columbia Business School alumni club (anyone can join, whether they went there or not) to take the New York session of his course, Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM). Having taken it about four years ago, I recommend the course without reservation. Click here for a pdf with[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I wrote about what I called the heart of freedom, stating that being able to choose your beliefs was more important than being able to change your environment. I quoted Viktor Frankl stating that being able to choose your beliefs was a freedom that could never be taken away. What does that freedom get you? “Just” feelings? Or does it get you more than that? He followed up yesterday’s[…] Keep reading →

Viktor Frankl, whom the Nazis captured and imprisoned as a slave laborer in concentration camps including Auschwitz and Dachau, perhaps best clarifies and shows that you can feel free independently of physical constraints and that feeling free gives you all the value of being free. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They[…] Keep reading →

Continuing yesterdays’ post… In the examples above, the categorization schemes worked because they categorized something with an underlying structure — the photon and its wavelength, the atom and its nucleus and electrons, natural selection and DNA, the (so far) fundamental particles and the laws governing their interactions. But not everything with patterns has an underlying structure. Let’s look at anatomy, for example. As we’ll see, it will reveal a lot[…] Keep reading →

Discovering the periodic table of the elements told us wonders about chemistry and pointed the way toward understanding atoms. Figuring it out pointed the way toward tremendous understanding and improving our lives. We found similar structures that revealed underlying structure in the spectrum of light, life’s family tree, the standard model of particle physics, and others. Wouldn’t it be great to find such a structure for our emotions and motivations?[…] Keep reading →