Awareness / Blog / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

The Model: models in general

[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 more value than reading just this post.] Before talking about the Model in particular, let's talk about models in general, a fundamental and incredibly useful concept in its own right. I've covered them before in this blog from several perspectives. Models are simplified representations of something for a purpose Models are simplified representations of something…

0 Comments
August 25, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

The Model

[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 more value than reading just this post.] What goals do we have in life if not to understand what makes life good and how to make our own better? By good I mean by the values of the person living that life -- not by some abstract standard. I want to distinguish the following from…

0 Comments
August 24, 2011
Awareness / Blog

The Model — introducing my model for the human emotional system

[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 more value than reading just this post.] I will be posting an extended series on the Model -- my model of the human emotional system, which is at the foundation of most of my posts here on self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and improving your life. It will cover the most useful and valuable ideas you will…

0 Comments
August 23, 2011
Blog / Nature

Three little birds

Another beautiful day in Jefferson Market Gardens across the street from my apartment, as pictured here. I videoed three birds taking baths in the fish pond there. Sorry about the camera-phone low quality video. Why not take a minute and a half to watch them relax in the summer weather, then listen to Bob Marley's Three Little Birds? https://joshuaspodek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/jefferson_market_birds1.avi "Don't worry about a thing, 'Cause every little thing gonna be all right. Singin': "Don't worry about a thing, 'Cause every little thing gonna be all right!" Rise up this mornin', Smiled with the risin' sun, Three little birds Pitch by my doorstep Singin' sweet songs Of melodies pure and true, Sayin', ("This is my message to you-ou-ou:") Singin': "Don't worry 'bout a thing, 'Cause every…

0 Comments
August 21, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Nature

When 100% orange juice isn’t: Pepsi, Coke, and agribusiness turn fruit into chemical concoctions

Today is another pause in my series on exercises on communications skills, based on some posts I read on orange juice and how agribusiness processes it. Do you love orange juice? How could it not be just squeezed fruit juice? I love fresh squeezed juice. Fresh squeezed orange juice is one of my favorite things on earth. Growing up we got it from concentrate, I guess because we couldn't afford not-from-concentrate. Once on my own, I switched to not-from-concentrate. I never moved up to fresh squeezed for two reasons -- it was too expensive and it would go bad before I finished it. So I stuck with not-from-concentrate. But wait a minute. Why didn't the not-from-concentrate go bad? How did it differ from fresh squeezed?…

0 Comments
August 1, 2011
Blog / Tips

You can’t “create your world” but you can do better.

I don't like most new age thinking. I consider it vague, misleading, and often vacuous. I prefer more precise thinking and communication, particularly when the subject is understanding yourself and your environment. Clarity and precision take more effort, but they pay off by making you more effective and productive. For example, new agers say things like "you create your world." I understand what they intend. I like the message of responsibility. I think believing you create your world can lead you to improvements over many alternatives. But the statement is vague. It implies you can create a world without gravity if you want to fly. Flying sounds fun, and with my science background I'm open to discovering holes in our present knowledge that would allow…

2 Comments
July 22, 2011
Blog / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

Calling emotions positive or negative doesn’t help — it hurts

Emotions are how your emotional system reacts to your perception of your environment with motivation to behave. In every culture around the world, in every language, essentially all of us share the same emotions. This commonality is not an accident. Human behavior is driven by human emotions and our behavior is what made us so overwhelmingly successful in population and geographic spread. Our behavior and emotions didn't come out of nowhere. They evolved, as in every other species. Our would-be ancestors who behaved less effectively in their environments didn't have as many children and we didn't descend from them. Our ancestors who behaved most effectively had the most children and we are their descendents. You may say you feel good when you enjoy ice cream…

0 Comments
July 16, 2011
Blog / Creativity / Education / Nature

Fun to imagine

Has anyone ever told you you were thinking about things too much? Was it an annoying thing for them to say, perhaps dismissive? When someone says that to me I usually point out how I like to play with ideas. Ideas to me are like blocks for a kid -- I like to put them together in different ways to see what they look like together, I build structures with them, I look at them from different angles to see what they look like, I share what I've come up with with others to get their perspective, and I'm curious what other people have come up with to expand my repertoire. To me playing with ideas is fun. Someone saying I'm thinking too much is…

2 Comments
July 12, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Nature

Travel and developing empathy

Yesterday's post on developing empathy started with me writing about traveling, which ended up being today's post. Nearly everyone tells me they love to travel. The top reason they give for it is to experience new people, places, and cultures. I get that appeal, but my goals are different. My main goal in life is to continue improving it. My travel goals are to contribute to that goal. Learning about differences doesn't serve that goal so well. My main goal in traveling is to see how similar people are despite their different environments, not to see how different they or their cultures are. I find that finding commonalities improves my life more. This goal comes from applying yesterday's exercise on people in new places. People…

0 Comments
July 4, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Nature / Tips

Exercise: how to improve your empathy

Here is a mental exercise I like and find effective in learning to empathize and understand people better. It costs nothing and requires no preparation, but it can be personally challenging, but it develops you as a person. The exercise is to see how diverse behavior in others you can explain without relying on saying someone else has different motivations than you do. The more you can explain their behavior, the more you have in common with them, the more you understand them, the more connected you will feel, and the better your life. It can be difficult at first when trying it on people who behave differently than you ever would have but gets easier with practice. Eventually you internalize the skills and instead…

0 Comments
July 3, 2011
Rock Star Dream
Continued Fraction
Awareness / Blog / Creativity / Education / Nature

Rock Star Dream

With my ability to announce my posts blocked by the Chinese government, now's my chance to indulge in a selfish post without destroying my modesty, since fewer people will find out about it. A few months ago I had the most amazing dream. It even impressed me. Somehow I dreamt about this: It's called a continued fraction. I know I'd seen the fraction before. I don't remember if anyone showed me how to solve it. I know I hadn't seen anything about it in years, maybe over a decade. The mildly rock star thing in my dream was that I realized how to solve it. I'm impressed I remembered it at all. I have no idea how my mind came to be thinking about it.…

0 Comments
July 2, 2011
Blog / Education / Leadership

Leadership seminar at New York Academy of Sciences posted

The leadership development seminar I led in April at the New York Academy of Sciences has been posted as an e-briefing. Now you can see me speak where Einstein and Darwin did, or at least they were members. You have to be a member to see the video, but the academy has great events. I recommend joining. You do love science, don't you? Here's the overview of the e-briefing: Overview Leadership coach, entrepreneur, and former physicist Joshua Spodek spoke from a scientist's and entrepreneur's perspective on developing personal leadership skills. The two-day, eight-hour interactive seminar took place April 5 and 7, 2011 at the New York Academy of Sciences and was designed to provide a foundation for the continued development of skills of personal leadership,…

0 Comments
June 9, 2011
Observations on Flow, part II: two improvements
Emotional state resulting from level of challenge and skill
Awareness / Education / Fitness / Models / Visualization

Observations on Flow, part II: two improvements

Following yesterday's primer on flow, here are two simple ideas to bring more flow. If you've read only Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, they may be new. The Wikipedia page on flow but not Csikszentmihalyi's book covers the first. The second is new, as far as I know, though small. Recall the ten conditions of the flow state (from Wikipedia, citing Csikszentmihalyi articles): Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high. Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it). A loss of…

0 Comments
May 26, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Education / Fitness

Observations on Flow, part I

Do you remember the last time you felt like this musician? You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as if you almost don't exist. I have experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching it in a state of awe and wonderment. And [the music] just flows out of itself. We all know the feeling. We love it. It's one of the great states of being. It comes through many ways -- sports, hobbies, work, conversation, etc. A psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, studied that state and called it flow, now established as a something to be studied and understood. I figure most…

0 Comments
May 25, 2011
A beautiful spring day in my neighborhood
Art / Blog / Nature

A beautiful spring day in my neighborhood

Saturday was such a beautiful day I couldn't resist walking in the park across the street from my building, making me late to meet my sister and nephew in Queens. The park is tiny but beautifully maintained by neighbors. It has a small walking path around it. The pictures in the slide show below follow my view walking around the path, sometimes looking forward, sometimes backward, sometimes toward the middle. It also turned out to be one of the biannual Jefferson Market Gardens Children's Festival of Flowers, so there were extra flowers, families, etc. My sister and nephew came back and enjoyed the park too. Until we got hungry, made nachos at my place, and ate them on my roof. Here's the slide show: Update:…

0 Comments
May 23, 2011
Blog / Entrepreneurship / Nature

A vegetarian entrepreneur’s take on test tube meat

This week's New Yorker has an article on test tube meat -- that is, meat produced outside a body. I've been talking about it for a while, as someone who doesn't eat meat and as an entrepreneur. I'm looking forward to reading the article. I first read about the idea on a nerdy site called Slashdot a couple years ago. Technology recently made it possible. I think most people's reaction is that it makes them queasy. It can't be that palatable, right? Then people think of the ethical issues -- is it cruel or not? Are we doing something we shouldn't? To me these issues are clear. Whether it's palatable or not now is merely an engineering question and a matter of time. If it…

0 Comments
May 18, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Evolutionary Psychology / Humor / Nature

Don’t be like a cheetah running into a wall

Every species has a few traits that give it advantages over any other. Cheetahs have their speed, for example. As far as I know they're the fastest animals on land. We have our intelligence, among other things. As far as I know, we're the most intelligent animal on land. Like other species with their traits, we have been using our intelligence to help us survive. We've been doing so for millions of years. So many people get so stressed over what they view as the complications of life or their lives. As I wrote recently, life is no more or less complicated than you believe it is. Everyone does what they think is best at the time -- as does every living creature. Some people…

0 Comments
May 16, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Nature / Tips

Your life is no more complicated than anyone else’s

"Josh, I really want to do X, but I can't. Things are too complicated right now." "I'm so stressed because my life is so complicated right now." "I wish my life were simpler so I could enjoy it." "So-and-so is making my life complicated!" We've all heard it before. Most of us have probably said it. Complication is like beauty -- a subjective opinion of the observer -- not like height or weight, which you can measure and remeasure. Your mental model of the situation -- your belief -- influences your perception, leading you to see something as complicated or simple. Change your model -- that is, change your belief -- and you'll perceive things to be as simple as you want them. Try this…

0 Comments
May 13, 2011
Blog / Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Evolutionary Psychology / Freedom / Tips

My New York Academy of Sciences Seminar

April 5 and 7, 6-10pm at the New York Academy of Sciences I will be giving my seminar on Leadership and Personal Success -- the best seminar you'll ever attend. It's similar to the leadership seminar at Columbia Business School in December, but more science-y and less business-y. Here's the background from the NYAS web page (where you can register): Leadership and personal success through self-awareness and emotional intelligence are popular pursuits outside the scientific community—for example, in business, sports, politics, etc. But why not in science? In part because their literature has shaky and often non- or even anti-scientific foundations. If the practices work, though, they are repeatable and amenable to study. Shouldn't we scientists should be able to understand and apply the material…

0 Comments
March 18, 2011
Blog / Nature

More awesome friends

I haven't forgotten about finishing up the creativity series. I got Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius out from the library again and am researching about the research before Jacob's. In the meantime, and continuing yesterday's topic of friends doing awesome things, check out what my friend from graduate school days, when she was a post-bac pre-med, is doing: a micro-farm in Nyack, 24 miles from Manhattan. Here's a recent article about them getting started and what they do in a local magazine. Here's a story about them in NPR. It sounds like various members of my family, who are all into gardening, cooking, composting, etc, will be visiting and bringing nieces and nephews. Speaking of composting, I've been collecting compost to bring to Union…

0 Comments
March 12, 2011
Blog

Predictably Irrational

Do you want a better life? The book Predictably Irrational is a great entry point to one, and to my philosophy. It's also a great book in its own right -- informative and well-written. From my perspective it's a great gateway to how to live a better life. Its title describes its two-part thesis. First, humans react irrationally to many things. Using "irrational" this way presupposes a definition the book implies is ineffective, but it's the usual economic definition -- roughly speaking in one's material interest. Second, we react predictably. However counter to our interests or otherwise irrational our reactions appear, on average we react the same. He gives many examples from observations and experiment (what a dream psychology experiments seem like from a former…

0 Comments
February 12, 2011
Awareness / Blog

What is a belief worth?

Continuing this post that our access to reality is limited by our senses and our minds can't comprehend it all, what then do we have in our minds?We form beliefs or mental models. What is a model? A model is a simplified representation of reality for a purpose. That previous post dealt with the ramifications of models being simplified -- that they are all flawed.If they are all flawed, what use are they? How do we evaluate them? That's where their being for a purpose comes in.The only meaningful measure for a model or belief is in how well it serves its purpose. If believing men are from Mars and women are from Venus leads you to have better relationships and a better life, it…

0 Comments
February 9, 2011
Blog / Freedom / Nature

Fracking — unhealthy for people who drink water or breathe air

(copying my post to another board where I learned about the movie, slightly out of context) I saw the movie Gasland about fracking last night at Cooper Union and heard Josh Fox, the guy who created it, speak. I don't recommend many movies, but I recommend this one. If you can talk to Josh Fox, all the better. I've since watched and read other web pages and videos. I don't claim to be an expert, but I believe I've learned enough to draw reasonable conclusions. I'm open to finding out I'm missing important points. Debates over Cheney's specific role or if showing the movie is the best way to influence policy are nearly negligible side issues to the issue that fracking is dangerous to huge…

0 Comments
February 4, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Evolutionary Psychology / Freedom

How much do you understand?

Want a liberating concept?Our brains and senses are limited. Our ancestors didn't evolve minds to understand everything or senses to sense everything. They evolved them to navigate their environments enough to propagate their genes. That's it. The ones that could had children eventually resulting in us. The ones that couldn't didn't.Limited senses mean we have limited access to the universe. The observable universe stretches for tens of billions of light years in every direction, yet from my chair I can see a few yards, hear a bit farther ... a bit more from other senses. In my whole life I've observed not much more.Limited processing power -- that is, brain power -- means of whatever we observe we can remember and understand a fraction. To…

0 Comments
February 3, 2011
Awareness / Blog / Tips

Less lingo please. More plain talk.

People use too much lingo. What do I mean by too much? I mean it when big or out-of-context words confuse more than illuminate or create meaning. Everybody knows it, we still do it more than we mean to. I'm going to examine the issue from a few perspectives.Having a background in science I see a lot of scientific sounding language where it seems people use it more to sound scientific than to convey meaning. Often they end up sounding less scientific. Science isn't the only place where people get lingo from, but it's a good example.Today I read a New York Times article on How Meditation May Change the Brain. The article is okay, but it illustrates how people misuse information and confuse it…

0 Comments
January 31, 2011

End of content

No more pages to load

Newer Posts
Older Posts