My interactions with North Korea have taught me more about myself and my values than anything else in recent memory. I was going to say it taught me more about being an American, but being an American means something different to me today than it used to, and means something different to everyone. I’m thinking about America in the context of North Korea today because I’m in the middle of[…] Keep reading →

A friend once put American values in perspective for me. He grew up in Romania. I met him in graduate school. He came to get a PhD in physics, became one of Columbia’s top students during our time, and ended up working on Wall Street. I asked him if he originally came to the U.S. to study physics or if he always knew he would go to Wall Street. He[…] Keep reading →

Working hard does not mean you get things done. Getting things done doesn’t necessarily require working hard. I waste time and I find myself often inefficient, but people say I’ve achieved a lot. Whether I’ve achieved a lot or not is opinion, but if they’re right, it’s because I know my priorities. I allow myself inefficiency on relatively unimportant things. The important things I don’t slack on. The important things[…] Keep reading →

I expect to log into Facebook once more — to message my connections there that they won’t be able to find me there, why, and where to find me instead — then I’ll leave for good. Why leave? I knew I wanted to leave after Facebook made its privacy policy too intrusive for my tastes. I felt they had too much control over my personal data. Facebook is creepy, getting[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on empathy gaps. 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.] A second post from the book Willpower… Leading yourself and others requires foreseeing that doing something hard feels harder, longer, more frustrating, and so on than you expect. At the beginning you say,[…] Keep reading →

People don’t talk about how much money they have in this country. I wrote the following essay on money for a class I’m taking. I hope it’s not too much or too little information. I don’t remember money concerning my family growing up. Sometimes we had more or less, but I don’t think anyone called us spoiled when we did well. I don’t think we felt hopeless when our block[…] Keep reading →

During orientation I learned one of business school’s most valuable lessons. I learned the first step in resolving all ethics problems. Orientation included a case study on ethics. The case involved a guy who witnessed someone else breaking a rule at a company. If he told on the employee he would escalate the problem, possibly identifying himself as not a team player, no matter how justified his actions. Remaining silent would[…] Keep reading →