Amazon link In response to my newsletter talking about Radical Friendship, a friend suggested I read this book, subtitled “The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World”. Dr. Murthy became the Surgeon General of the United States in 2014, and was initially focused on all the usual health problems of heart disease, […]
Category: people
You don’t have the answer
One of my pet peeves is when people tell me what I should do. Normally, this is because they did something that worked for them, and they want to tell me I should also do it. I generally don’t want such advice for a variety of reasons: I don’t want the same thing that they […]
Creating Alignment with Others
I’ve described leadership as the art of identifying gaps between what is and what could be, and mobilizing others to address them. In the alignment series thus far, I have been addressing the identifying gaps part of leadership in identifying your own gaps for personal development, identifying an aspiration to orient your actions, and identifying […]
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Amazon link I purchased this book when it came out several years ago, but gave up on reading it at the time because I didn’t have the patience to absorb Coates’s words and perspective. I restarted it this week, and finished it in a couple days, as it’s not a long book…but it is a […]
Changing behavior by changing identity
When you picture yourself five years from now, who will you be? Most of us assume that we will be basically the same as today. We’ll have the same friends, we’ll do the same activities, we’ll make similar decisions as we make today, etc. Now compare yourself to who you were five years ago. Do […]
The Power of Accountability Partners
As we start a new year and a new decade, many people are setting goals and resolutions for themselves as they feel energized by the possibilities as the calendar turns. And yet we all know that our motivation for these goals and resolutions quickly declines, and we often fall back into our old routines by […]
The Orchid and the Dandelion, by W. Thomas Boyce
Amazon link “Most children are more or less like dandelions; they prosper and thrive almost anywhere they are planted. Like dandelions, these are the majority of children whose well-being is all but assured by their constitutional hardiness and strength. There are others, however, who, more like orchids, can wither and fade when unattended by caring […]
The Power of Onlyness, by Nilofer Merchant
Amazon link Official book site When I met Nilofer Merchant at a Seth Godin workshop several years ago, I was impressed by her presence and her clarity of thinking on the emerging social-network-based world. I finally got around to reading her latest book, The Power of Onlyness, where she makes the emphatic case that each […]
Find the Others
Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, […]
Changing the pattern of a relationship
When people are in a relationship, whether as romantic partners, friends, or co-workers, they often fall into a routine of how they interact with the other. Once this pattern is set early in the relationship, it often does not change. This can be problematic if the pattern does not serve one of the participants, or […]