The one person you can never see from another person’s perspective is yourself

The one person you can never see from another person's perspective is yourself. Ironic because that's the one person you'd most like to see from another person's perspective. Everyone else sees you that way, so it would be nice to see how other people see us. You always hear stories about people who think they're great leaders, but unknown to them, they always scowl or their voices don't sound like they think they do or people undermine them behind their backs. As a coach, offering an external perspective -- a mirror -- is one of the more valuable services I…

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More on becoming a superstar

I wanted to comment on a quote in yesterday's post about becoming a superstar that illustrates an aspect important for the aspiring star -- you. And, again, superstardom can mean breakout success in any area -- starting a company, making CEO, being a superstar boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, etc. A musician I quoted yesterday commented that American Idol's shooting-the-moon style isn't really about music. It's about all the bad aspects of the music business – the arrogance of commerce, this sense of 'I know what will make this person a star; artists themselves don't know.' I've only seen a few…

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How to become a superstar

This post is about breakout success in any area -- starting a company, making CEO, being a superstar boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, etc -- but I'll put it in the language of entertainment superstardom. I'll leave translating it to the language of the field you want to succeed in as an exercise. But I guarantee it applies. Superstars make it look so easy. They dress how they want, say what they want, and do what they want and the world loves them for it. Everyone else has to think about what they say and do all the time -- and…

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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,…

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Facebook’s woes and what it could have done instead

If you know me, you'd expect Facebook's woes to mean the problems Facebook inflicts on its users who haven't left it yet. After all, leaving Facebook is easy and fun. Yes, they're reaching a billion users, but I'm no longer one of them and once you leave the site seems weird, like why would you do business with such a creepy company. From the New York Times, Facebook Shares Plummet in an Earnings Letdown: "Unhappy with Facebook’s first financial report as a public company Thursday, investors fled the stock in droves..." Most of you probably expect the drop resulted from…

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What works in X web page mind map

Following up a comment on my post on the What Works in X web page genius idea, I created a mind map as a rough outline for the site to illustrate it better. It's only a rough outline, but I think a good start. Copying from my response to the reader's comment I envision people at What Works in X sharing anecdotes of things they’ve done at a higher level, like how they got hired by doing something different or got into North Korea or things like that... available in any area. Of course, I put the idea up for…

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Another genius business idea: the “What Works in X” web page

Following up on yesterdays' genius business idea for a book series of successful solved problems in many fields, today let's look at a web page doing something similar. Instead of making it just like a book, let's take advantage of the web's interactivity and let users create content. It's based on the principles of the Art of What Works (the book I mentioned the other day) The product A web site of user-written anecdotes of successful things they did, categorized by field -- eventually, the global repository of solved problems in every field, free for anyone to access or contribute…

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Another genius business idea: the “What Works in X” book series

For the first genius business idea (the series I mentioned a couple days ago) I propose a book series based on the principles of the Art of What Works (the book I mentioned yesterday). The product A series of books like the "for dummies" and "for complete idiot" series, all with the same dimensions, cover design and color scheme, tone, writing style, etc called "What works inX", like "What Works in Selling Your House", "What Works in Nursing", "What Works in Teaching High School", or "What Works in Starting Your Own Restaurant." Each book contains anecdotes of people achieving success…

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The Art of What Works

One of Columbia Business School's most popular courses in recent years has been in strategy, called Napoleon's Glance, named after a book by the instructor, Bill Duggan. Former students I've talked to rave about it. I was fortunate to do an independent study with him before his course exploded in popularity. Now it's so successful I doubt he could devote that kind of attention to a single student. Despite the course's immense popularity at one of the world's great business schools, I was more influenced by his book The Art of What Works. This excerpt from the back cover gets…

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Leadership, personal development, choosing to care, and emotional pain

Devoting yourself to something means emotions can get attached. This happens as much in professional leadership as in personal lives. In professional environments you can choose to care deeply about your work or not. Entrepreneurs can devote themselves so much as to lose everything in a project. Athletes and teams that come in second often seem more crushed, despite being the second best in the world, than those who merely qualified to compete and finished far behind. And who among us doesn't know the pain of a relationship ending? Success means you will fail along the way. Nobody wins every…

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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…

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Every moment counts

If you like improving your life enough to read my stuff, you probably know about a study (probably one of many) that found that people who won the lottery and people who had accidents that left them in wheelchairs both returned to the same emotional levels a year later. What do you conclude from such results? How much can we misunderstand ourselves if winning the lottery doesn't help out lives? Or if spinal injuries don't? These results sounds counterintuitive. Most of us would prefer winning the lottery to losing control of our arms and legs, or even just not winning…

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Public speaking: one way to captivate audiences

Between my talks and seminars and the university courses I've taught, I get to speak in public a fair amount. We all know one of the main challenges of public speaking is keeping the audience engaged -- a bigger one being how to recapture an audience's attention if you lose it. Here's a trick that works every time. Although doing it can challenge you more than you think you can handle (another reason to do it) if you aren't comfortable with yourself. I learned it giving talks on entrepreneurship -- mainly talking about starting Submedia. Sometimes my talks required talking…

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A leadership dream

Since posting on lessons leaders can learn from method acting, I've been thinking about parallels between acting and leadership -- in particular how acting changed when Constantine Stanislovski led changing the art to expressive and internal from impressive and external. "Impressive and external" means the actor tried to impress the audience with outward showiness. "Expressive and internal" means the actor tries to find emotions inside and express them. You know what acting before looked like. Jon Lovitz and John Lithgow mocked that style on Saturday Night Live in its Master Thespian sketches in the late 80s (this transcript of a…

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Spending less improves your life

Preface: I started writing this blog about how cutting personal costs (of any resource, including time, money, energy, attention, etc) improves your personal life. Rereading it I realized it overlapped so much with what leaders can do in business, I'll tag it leadership too. Translating the post into business-speak I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. You can probably do it on the fly. People who know me in person know I work very little at a job -- like a day a week, sometimes more in crunch times, which happen once a year or so. When they hear…

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The bigger problems you don’t consider big deals, the more important people consider you

Does the title of this post not explain itself? People who know what they're doing stay calm under pressure. Things that bother some people don't bother them. People who don't know what they're doing freak out at little things. In money terms, if you don't have enough to live on, problems on the scale of a few dollars may bother you. If you have millions, problems of a thousands of dollars may not bother you. In terms of social and leadership skills, if you don't have enough skills to get a job done, small issues will bother you. If your…

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A tip for high-status behavior

A friend taught me a great lesson in how people with higher status behave compared to people with lower status. Here it is as a piece of advice What you can say in many words, say in few. What you can say in few words, say with a gesture. What you can say with a gesture, say with a subtle gesture. These words give great advice while describing the effectiveness of body language over words and subtlety over rambling. Next time you find yourself talking a lot, realize you're undermining yourself. Next time you're with someone whose status is much…

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Learning social skills helps your life more than almost anything

Two nights ago I walked with a friend past an exclusive resort she told me had a stunning rooftop infinity pool overlooking the city (pictures here). Entrance required getting a minimum $400 room. Instead I talked to a few people, got invited up, and we enjoyed the pool and view as invited guests. (I still had to swim in my boxer shorts because how was I supposed to know I was going to end up there, but that only added to the fun.) Recently I got invited last-minute to a friend-of-a-friend's birthday party at a private club. There was no…

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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,…

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Leadership lessons from method acting

Leadership and acting have a lot in common. Both crafts require practitioners to be aware of and to manage their emotions and those of people around them. They evoke different emotions -- leaders generally don't try to get people to cry and actors generally don't get people to work weekends -- but their crafts overlap nonetheless. I've linked to Inside the Actors Studio before and I'll keep linking to them. I'm in the middle of watching the host, James Lipton, interviewed by the great comedian (and apparently friend), David Chappelle for the 200th episode of the show. I'm only half…

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Difficult lessons in leadership

You learn leadership through experience. I've had occasion to recall some of the most challenging and educational experiences of my development. I'm not proud of them. I wish they had never happened. But they formed me as much as anything. The painful experiences I co-founded Submedia in the late 90s. By the early 2000s we had nearly run out of money and were having trouble paying our debts. My PhD in physics, however useful for some things, hadn't prepared me for running a business. Neither did a childhood with little business training. Loneliness I don't know how my best attempts…

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America’s infrastructure, leadership, idealism, and getting the job done

I've been talking to my American friends overseas about differences between the U.S. and the countries they're living in. Top on the list are infrastructure and what the government does for the people it represents. I think government services rank so highly because when you get to know them, people tend to be the same everywhere. They usually know differences in food before they go. After the people you notice what you have to pay for or not. And once people get used to services like trains, health care, internet, and such included with their taxes, they notice their absence…

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Great videos on understanding the economy, environment, and energy

If we could use leadership in any place most, I can think of few places more important than in understanding what is happening with our environment, energy, and how it will affect us, meaning the economy. Some conclude that since before Revelations through Malthus and beyond people have been predicting the end of the world, yet the world hasn't ended, we have solved all problems before and we'll solve whatever problems come. For many reasons I disagree. I'd go into my main reasons, and in a future post I may, but Limits to Growth explains the reasons better than I…

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Facebook versus Walden

Walden is one of the great American books on nature and American society. Friends and longtime readers know I like it and much of its message. It criticizes the pick-a-little-talk-a-little-cheep-cheep-cheep-talk-a-lot-pick-a-little-more gossip-about-your-neighbor culture in favor of simplicity and appreciating nature. Facebook is in the news a lot. The opening sentences to Walden made me think about Facebook and the values spending time on it promotes. When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden…

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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…

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