motivation Archives - Page 5 of 12 - Joshua Spodek

Awareness / Blog / Leadership / Tips

How far should I develop myself? It’s hard!

A client asked me about doing exercises to develop leadership and social skills. He pointed out most people don't do them. Some people do them differently. He's been doing them a while and has seen some progress, but knows he has a long way to go. He asked my thoughts on how much he should do. I wrote the following. I look at leadership and social skills, leadership, and self-awareness exercises like learning any major life skill, like playing a sport, learning to dance, to play music, etc. In sports you have to run drills. You have to run sprints, sometimes in the rain, sometimes when you don't think you have it in you. You can skip those things, but in sports you compete, so…

August 4, 2012

Blog / Freedom / Tips

Words to help you do things daily

I think of a certain piece of advice almost daily in maintaining my daily routine. I find it invaluable. When I started this page I asked a friend with a successful blog how often he wrote -- only weekdays, daily, now and then? He said words that stuck with me well. If you skip one day you can skip two. Once you skip two days it's over. Conclusion: don't skip days. Also, don't plan to do things daily that you can't keep up. You may only reinforce a lack of value in those things -- the opposite of your goals. This advice only applies to a few things in life. You have to know your priorities, but for things that match your priorities, the advice…

July 24, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Freedom

My fitness habits, part 4: Nothing special about what I did

Since so many people don't like their physical condition, don't find reward or joy in exercising, and regard these aspects of their life as punishments, I imagine many of them want to change their beliefs and behaviors, perhaps using my example as inspiration. Many people may not care too, I guess. I've written a lot on the topics -- enough that it might seem overwhelming. Can anyone do what I do? I didn't do anything anyone else couldn't. Maybe they don't want to or haven't figured out how to, but they could. I don't read many diet or exercise books, but I have a feeling they don't make a point of focusing on your emotions, which I consider the foundation for successful change. I focus…

July 20, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Freedom

My fitness habits, part 3: Exercise

As I've written before, exercise for me is about the emotions it creates. I start exercises for joy, fun, friendship, etc. For many people exercise seems punishing. If I didn't realize I, like anyone, could make exercise create whatever emotions I wanted and I felt stuck with punishment, I wouldn't do it. Luckily I learned to find the joy, fun, etc in exercise -- as anyone can -- and built from there. History I've exercised consistently since I started running cross country in high school in the 80s. I was chubby as a kid -- at least I remember my older step-brother teasing me about being chubby before I started sports. Although they signed me up for little league baseball and soccer, I don't remember…

July 19, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Freedom

My fitness beliefs and habits, part 2: Food and Eating

What I eat I don't feel like I pay attention to what I eat that much, although I've habitualized a lot so I probably eat healthily without thinking about it. I don't pay attention to proteins versus carbohydrates. I definitely don't count calories. I think paying attention to those things means you're eating the wrong things. I mean, I'm kind of aware of those things, but the more I eat fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains, the less I pay attention to proteins, carbohydrates, and calories and the better my body seems. How can you eat too much spinach, mangoes, or oats? Can you? I mean, your body will stop you before you can. With sugary beverages, I've noticed your tongue always sends signals…

July 18, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Freedom

My fitness beliefs and habits, part 1: Principles

A reader asked I like what you said about the body being a reflection of how we live our life. I also agree about the genetics; its too much of a cop out to say that you can't help being obese. I do have a question though. Your photos show that you are in shape but you have previously posted that your workout regimen consists of only a minute of burpees twice a day. As someone who works out an hour a day to stay in shape this blows my mind. Are you rationing calories as well or just watching what you eat? Do you have any before/after photos showing the progress made after 6 months on this program? Context The short response to that…

July 17, 2012

North Korea and inequity

Inequity and its consequences If some people succeed without having to work and others have no chance to succeed, you create feelings of unfairness. Those feelings of unfairness will motivate people to return the unfairness at those who create, maintain, or benefit from the system. Everyone recognizes this situation in North Korea. Even outsiders, who have no interaction with the system, feel outraged and wish harm on the people in charge. People feel the type of wish to harm them normally reserved for ticks, leeches, and genuine parasites. We see the North Korean people not revolting and conclude the regime must be repressing them more. The reason I mention inequity, as usual with me and observations of North Korea, is what it reveals about my…

July 16, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Leadership / Tips

You don’t find your passion, you create it

A client asked how to find your passion (in the context of relationships, as you'll see). I wrote the following (slightly edited). -------------------------------- You don't find some single latent passion within you, if only you can find it. You create it. What is passion? It's powerful emotion. Emotion doesn't come from out there. It comes from in here. How do you create something in here? Not by looking out there. By growing, learning, building, exploring, and developing skills in here. Stuff out there gives you something to work with, but your passion is inside you. You have a zillion things you like, each of which could grow to into one of, or the, overarching source of passion that drives your life. Until I found out…

July 15, 2012

Blog

The scourge of romantic comedies

Romantic comedies hurt us. If you know me long enough you'll hear many reasons why. Today I'll talk about a couple. In nearly all of them the girl comes to realize how great the guy really is under the surface. She realizes who he really is. She also realizes who the bad guy is and why he's bad. Unsuccessful guys who just know how great they are underneath see them and think, if only people could see how he is inside he'd be a winner. He hopes that if he stays the course a girl will recognize him for it. How many counterproductive beliefs and behaviors does this model reinforce? It makes people worse by any standard I can think of. Probably the aspect that…

July 7, 2012

If you crave something you don’t have, people who have it will always be able to control you

The title of this post speaks for itself so I'll keep it short. I just keep seeing people wishing they had more than they need not realizing how they are creating jails for themselves, giving others control over their lives. If you always want more money, people with more money will get you to work for them. If you want fame, people with access to media will get you to work for them. If you want power and influence, people with power and influence will get you to work for them. You get the idea. Oh, and when they get you to work for them, they won't reward you for it. If you don't crave something, someone will try to convince you that you do…

July 6, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Freedom

Burpee overview

[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, I wrote a six-month review, which ended up as a long post on friendship, freedom, and motivation. It reinforces that sharing what you love fills your life with sharing, love, and the stuff you love. As people who have read all my posts on the Model and Method know, a thing's value, meaning, and purpose…

June 25, 2012

Explaining China’s support for North Korea

I've had trouble explaining China's fortitude in supporting North Korea. A recent article by the former U.S. Ambassador to China, J. Stapleton Roy, explained it for me. His article also stressed that people and nations are behaving rationally in the region, however self-contradictory and irrational they may seem to those who don't understand their perspectives and motivations. I figured China supported North Korea in the Korean War mainly to keep a buffer between it and the United States military in South Korea. That perspective was on the right track, but just scratched the surface. Three devastating wars and invasions began from the Korean peninsula in modern times. As Mr. Roy states, The Korean Peninsula has posed a massive security problem for China for well over…

June 25, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Tips

Burpee six-month review

[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.] I refer to burpees so much I'm making a page to consolidate my burpee references (EDIT: now tomorrow's post). As I'm writing this, I only have three posts specifically on burpees (four when I post this, more evidence on how sharing what you love fills your life with sharing, love, and stuff you love), but I link to it a lot. Also, enough people I meet in person hear about burpees that it makes sense to link to this page from…

June 24, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Freedom / Leadership

Living by your values

A client asked about something in his personal life. He does things one way that most parts of society do differently. To be clear, his way harmed no one and was in no way illegal, but he was concerned that people who learned about it might freak out. Sorry I have to keep the details to a minimum, but we all recognize his situation is universal. We all have things we do a certain way that society/family/school/church/government/etc does differently. A great thing about the internet is that we can easily learn that millions of others also do it that way, even if we can't meet them in person. You can't anticipate or change other people's expectations before you meet them. Like everyone, you also have…

June 12, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Freedom / Nature

What is progress?

Almost daily I face what I see as the key misunderstanding between how to lead your life to everything you want from it and how to follow what society tells you to. If you're lucky the latter will bring you what you want. You're guaranteed to produce for others, but you may never create what you want for yourself. By contrast, the former -- leading your life based on your values, meaning, and purpose, which are based on your emotional reactions (what motivates you, how you motivate others, etc) -- will always lead to a rewarding life, always great by your standards, no matter how things turn out. People call growth progress and by growth they mean the material outputs of society, which may be…

June 8, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Tips

Every word you say counts

A couple clients recently thanked me for some advice I had given outside our main conversation, almost as asides, but that worked. Every word counts I told them that every word you say contributes to your identity, even if only to yourself. And that every word influences how everyone, including yourself, perceives you. Context They were talking about some problems they were working through. They said things like "I have anxiety in social situations" "I don't know how to talk to people I don't know." "Changing yourself is hard and takes time." I suggested changing statements like those to "I used to have anxiety in social situations" "I'm getting over anxiety from social situations" "I get less anxiety from social situations than I used to"…

June 5, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Freedom / Leadership

Creating your emotions — my friend’s incredibly successful story

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 hadn't put them to use much when he noticed he had felt depressed for a while. As many of us know, when you feel depressed, you often don't want to change how you feel. You just want to wallow in your misery. Feeling other ways feels fake, like happiness means you're ignoring how things really…

May 31, 2012

Blog / Leadership

Why people flip out (including yourself) and what to do about it

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 -- calmness, satisfaction, and laziness being emotions, for example -- I specify that losing your cool means your emotions became intense. The problem with the pattern Intense emotions override other emotions and rational thought. People feeling intense emotions react without thinking -- the opposite of leadership. You don't like working with people like that. One…

May 24, 2012

Blog / Freedom / Leadership / NorthKorea

Robert McNamara on Vietnam and leadership (or lack thereof) that led to the war

Following up on Vietnam, leadership, and the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I wanted to include some quotes by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. As the BBC's obituary noted, To anti-war protesters at the time, McNamara became something of a hate figure, an arrogant ultra-hawk responsible for escalating the war. He fully supported, Johnson's decision to put ground troops into Vietnam in a bid to prop up the unstable South Vietnamese government and prevent political disintegration which would have aided the Communist cause... By 1966, McNamara had begun to question the wisdom of US involvement in Vietnam and, a year later, was privately advising Johnson to end the war by negotiation. He initiated a full investigation of…

May 22, 2012

Leadership and the environment

Blog / Freedom / Leadership / NorthKorea

Leadership and the environment

The number one defining property of leaders Defining property number one about leaders from leadership guru Michael Feiner (and my professor) is leaders ship. They get the job done. Nobody I know of whose paycheck doesn't originate with fossil fuels or fundamentalist religion believes we are heading in a healthy direction for our environment. But we all respond to incentives and the incentives of our system -- huge roads, low density suburbs, huge subsidies for fossil fuels, no costs to pollute, etc -- promote pollution, producing CO2, and so on. Governments write and enforce the laws forming most of these systems. As long as governments aren't changing the systems to reflect what people want, they aren't leading. As long as the media is reporting controversy…

May 18, 2012

Entrepreneurship / Tips

Entrepreneurs: think twice before taking advice from venture capitalists

I wrote the following after reading this article from a venture capitalist giving advice to people thinking about starting companies. A lot of advice VCs give entrepreneurs seems to me versions of "make my job easier," like how to write a great business plan, how to pitch, etc. In this case, I see him asking entrepreneurs to improve the signal-to-noise ratio so he can have an easier time funding companies. Nothing wrong with trying to make your life easier, but he makes the article look like he's helping the entrepreneur, when he's writing it to help himself, discouraging some would-be entrepreneurs who might love starting a company even if it didn't make a VC money. For an entrepreneur who makes their business their life, leading…

May 14, 2012

Blog / Leadership / Nature / Tips

A leader and physicist’s view on morality, ethics, and judgment

Wrapping up my series on the counterproductivity of leading with morality, ethics, and judgment, I'll present a model based I got from Einstein. Without all the emotion judgment can grip you with, you can understand the physics model easily. Then you can apply it to the emotional situation. Then I bet you'll improve your life. Before Einstein: the problem of the aether Before Einstein, people created a concept called the aether. They saw light traveling through a vacuum and figured something must be there, so they created a concept. For years they looked for properties of it. No one succeeded. You might remember the Michelson-Morley experiment from high school physics that famously couldn't detect the aether. That was a problem. People were looking for something…

May 10, 2012

Blog / Leadership / Tips

How do you lead when you can’t stand working with someone?

Yesterday I wrote on how to lead people (yourself or others) you disagree with without judging them. I skipped cases where you felt you could not work with the person under any circumstances. Let's look at such cases today. I'm going to treat these cases strategically. Most cases will be unique at the tactical level so you'll have to figure out how to apply the strategy. If you can't work with someone, YOU have a problem First things first. No matter how bad you think they are, no matter how much evidence you have pointing out their faults and shortcomings, no matter how many other people agree the other person has problems, you have a problem too. I'm not saying they don't have problems too.…

May 9, 2012

Blog / Leadership / Tips

Deciding right and wrong for others and causing them guilt and blame doesn’t help anyone

Prelude: this is about leadership (of others and yourself) Yesterday I outlined an essay on the counterproductivity of deciding right and wrong for people who disagree with you. Today I'm fleshing out the essay. The point of this blog is to help people lead -- to influence others, to work with them in teams, to negotiate with them, and so on -- even when you disagree. So I'll leave deciding right and wrong for others, figuring that, since some issues haven't been resolved for thousands of years, you might not resolve them before you have to deliver on your project (or while you improve your life if we're talking about leading yourself). Successful leaders ship while attract people to work with them. Today's post covers…

May 8, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Leadership

The New York Times had a contest about my post

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 against leaders' interests (depending on how you want to lead) -- polarization and argumentation -- works for news media. Here is the statement of the contest Here are the submissions with the most votes Here is the winning submission This difference in interests illustrates a glaring bias inherent to news reports. Promoting division and argument…

May 7, 2012

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