I was watching Chris Rock on Inside the Actors Studio. He talked about how growing up in dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn helped form him. Personally, I highly value the self-made-ness of a self-made man or woman. I think most people do, especially compared to someone born with a silver spoon in their mouth. His description of his childhood in a bad neighborhood reminded me of a neighborhood I spent some[…] Keep reading →

Society values originality and creativity in problem solving instead of getting the job done. I’ll illustrate how. Imagine you have a problem you need solved. For concreteness let’s say you need plumbing work done in your house, but it could apply to any problem, personal, professional, or otherwise. Say you ask two plumbers how they would fix the problem to decide whom to hire. The first plumber says “I have[…] Keep reading →

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[…] Keep reading →

We visited North Korea for ten days in April, in part for the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth. North Korea is amazing. This trip surpassed our first in many ways, as before in ways we could never have predicted and, having experienced it, can’t explain, much as we’d like to. Everyone on the trip agreed, as happened with the first trip. You had to be there to feel[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written about Do The Math, the blog that takes a quantitative, scientific, and usually non-judgmental approach to understanding our impact on the environment. I posted on it today for the first time about some questions I’d been thinking about for a while but haven’t approached in that blog’s way. He has written about increasing his efficiency in using energy. I generally applaud that approach and do it myself, but[…] Keep reading →

Crunch time means you don’t have a lot of time, you have a lot to do, mistakes can cost a lot, people depend on you, and likely you depend on other people. People make mistakes. Also, sometimes you have to make decisions based on less information than you’d like. If people dwell on the mistakes or find out later that someone else could have made a better decision, they point[…] Keep reading →

My closing paragraphs on yesterday’s post, anticipating people’s reaction, got me thinking about Marshall Goldsmith, one of today’s top business thinkers (and a friend). I wrote the following: By now, many of you are probably thinking “we’ve solved all the problems so far, we’ll solve the ones to come” “since before Malthus scientists project doomsday and they never happen, we can ignore this” or “this won’t affect me” If so,[…] Keep reading →