A model to allow yourself to fail, which gives you freedom to succeed

[Today is the fifth in a series on my daily and weekly beliefs, in no particular order. See the introduction to the series and the value of flexibility in beliefs for background.] Do you ever not do something for fear you'll fail at it? You've probably heard the phrase that the perfect is the enemy of the good. You may also have noticed that people who achieve greatness don't do things perfectly. How do you become great if you don't do everything perfectly? Here's a model I use to allow yourself to do something without worrying too much about failing…

Continue ReadingA model to allow yourself to fail, which gives you freedom to succeed

The limits of what you can achieve

The changes you can make that will affect your life most are in your personal leadership skills -- how you perceive yourself, others, and your environment; how you manage conflict; how you influence yourself and others; and the other components of leadership. These changes will affect how you experience life more than external things like winning the lottery, where you live, etc, no matter how big they seem. In fact, if you don't change these things, you can win the lottery or any other big change and the important parts of your life won't change much. You might have a…

Continue ReadingThe limits of what you can achieve

Video: Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery on the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth

A video of the Revolutionary Martyrs' Cemetery on the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth -- roughly like being at Arlington on July 4, 1976. There were many soldiers and foreign tourists, making for an odd mix. Normally the government prohibits tourists from taking pictures of the military, but perhaps for the special day, since they were there ceremonially, and since there were so many of them they let us take pictures and video of them. The cemetery also overlooks Pyongyang and the Mausoleum holding the bodies of Kim Il Sung and, presumably by this point, Kim Jong Il,…

Continue ReadingVideo: Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery on the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth

Video: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square, part 2

Shortly after last post's videos, we returned to Kim Il Sung Square and interacted with more North Koreans, overcoming language obstacles in North Korea with friendly body language. If our would-be leaders don't create peace, understanding, and communication between us, we have to lead them. The more we interact the more we understand each other. That's how we show we aren't the monsters or dupes their government says we are and vice versa. When was the last time you saw so many North Koreans smiling, shaking hands, high-fiving, and laughing with Americans? The woman you see returning my camera after…

Continue ReadingVideo: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square, part 2

Video: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square

Usually I post North Korea posts separate from my main page, but I consider today's videos too-good examples of leadership not to include in the main page (despite being in the middle of a series of George Clooney posts). The scene: Kim Il Sung Square, Pyongyang, April 14, 2012 -- the day before the celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth. Whether you like him or not, his country reveres and honors him. The equivalent in America would be the Mall in D.C. on July 3, 1976. When you see military parades of North Korea, you're seeing…

Continue ReadingVideo: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square

Previously Unreleased Interviews with The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from WNYC

I don't celebrate all major holidays, but I celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Every year I take time to do something special for the day. Usually I do something to honor his memory and achievements or learn more history. This year I have two things. First, a friend told me that WNYC just released four in-depth interviews of him. Each is about thirty minutes, so I got to listen to him speak -- not a speech or prepared anything. He was thirty-two years old in the first three (in 1961). The fourth was in 1967, with clips from 1966…

Continue ReadingPreviously Unreleased Interviews with The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from WNYC

How to make yourself more confident

Is there anything you do that wouldn't benefit from having more confidence? Even if showing confidence doesn't make a difference, at least having the option to show it helps. Have you noticed that people with more confidence can't do that much more than people without it? They can't lift heavier weights or solve more difficult problems. The guy at the gym who lifts the heaviest weights probably isn't the most confident person there. Alternatively, you can lift weights all you want -- that alone won't make you more confident. So what does? A friend just wrote me that she didn't…

Continue ReadingHow to make yourself more confident

Motivating populations

I figure most people have seen this quote before. It's scary -- particularly for how matter-of-fact it is. You get the idea he has no doubt of the effectiveness of his strategy, probably from years of trial and error. It's scary not just for its historical roots, but for how well it seems to work in more mundane but still important contexts -- particularly with national leaders. People as individuals consider themselves (ourselves) independent and intelligent. Large groups of people seem to lose those properties. Anyway, sorry about posting something so serious out of the blue. I just keep meaning…

Continue ReadingMotivating populations

Examples of ignoring impediments on the way to greatness

When you think of great orators, Winston Churchill has to be near the top of the list. His speeches include I would say to the House as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. and Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus…

Continue ReadingExamples of ignoring impediments on the way to greatness

Lessons in freedom from Charles Barkley

When I talk about freedom here I usually mean your mental freedom to think and believe what you want. I consider this freedom more fundamental than, say, political freedom, not that I see much point in comparing them. Everyone benefits from both and few, if anyone, has to choose between either. Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning described how fundamental he considered the freedom to believe what you want, the freedom that allowed him to find meaning in life as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of…

Continue ReadingLessons in freedom from Charles Barkley

Power, leadership, lawlessness, justice, and amnesty

I'm going to present an over-simplified case related to issues many of us face in much smaller contexts. The goal is to learn from simple hypothetical cases to build experience for more complex, real-life cases. Normally I separate my North Korea posts from leadership ones, but they overlap here, along with my being in China now. One of the greater challenges the world faces is how to bring some kind of justice, or at least rule of law, to the North Korean regime. I think any community in the world not directly benefiting from the North Korean government's behavior would…

Continue ReadingPower, leadership, lawlessness, justice, and amnesty

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…

Continue ReadingMore on becoming a superstar

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…

Continue ReadingHow to become a superstar

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…

Continue ReadingSpending less improves your life

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,…

Continue ReadingLiving by your values

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…

Continue ReadingFacebook versus Walden

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…

Continue ReadingCreating your emotions — my friend’s incredibly successful story

A leadership perspective on differences between economic systems

Watching people on the streets of North Korea, you see a different culture than in New York City. In three cumulative weeks in North Korea I saw almost no one hurrying or seeming like they wanted to get somewhere important. I was curious if I could find a root cause. From a leadership perspective -- that is, for someone who wants to motivate and lead others -- how do capitalism and communism differ? When you create your teams and organizations, you create systems that affect everyone in the team, whether you realize it or not. How do you motivate people? Will…

Continue ReadingA leadership perspective on differences between economic systems

Robert McNamara on Vietnam and leadership (or lack thereof) that led to the war

Following up on Vietnam, leadership, and the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I wanted to include some quotes by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. As the BBC's obituary noted, To anti-war protesters at the time, McNamara became something of a hate figure, an arrogant ultra-hawk responsible for escalating the war. He fully supported, Johnson's decision to put ground troops into Vietnam in a bid to prop up the unstable South Vietnamese government and prevent political disintegration which would have aided the Communist cause... By 1966, McNamara had begun to question the wisdom…

Continue ReadingRobert McNamara on Vietnam and leadership (or lack thereof) that led to the war

Leadership and the environment

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 density suburbs, huge subsidies for fossil fuels, no costs to pollute, etc -- promote pollution, producing CO2, and so on. Governments write and enforce the laws forming most of these…

Continue ReadingLeadership and the environment

I don’t know when the United States and North Korean governments will be at peace, but we made it sooner

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 it, but we'll do our best to convey what we experienced, because at the root we communicated, shared experiences, increased understanding, and all the things that create peaceful interaction in…

Continue ReadingI don’t know when the United States and North Korean governments will be at peace, but we made it sooner

On the counterproductivity of motivating people with guilt and blame — aka moralizing

I liked Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which people have suggested I read for years. I like his perspective on food and "food." I don't intend for the following to detract from his overall message, but his chapter 17, "The Ethics of Eating Animals," makes a great example for leadership. Leadership means motivating others, which means changing their emotions. Few of us like when others motivate us with guilt or blame, so I find using leading through those emotions counterproductive. Claiming to appeal to absolute measures of right, wrong, good, bad, or evil tend to polarize. Motivating through guilt or blame…

Continue ReadingOn the counterproductivity of motivating people with guilt and blame — aka moralizing

Back from North Korea!

Greetings from Beijing and another amazing North Korea trip! This time we visited places few (no?) Americans or non-North Koreans have visited in decades. We also saw the incredible beauty of the country outside Pyongyang and the DMZ. Pictures and stories to come! By the way, I tag this post with leadership because, as you'll see, we did a lot more than just tour around. We interacted directly with many North Koreans, especially kids. You'll be amazed at what we did. We heard other groups complaining to their guides that they couldn't do things we did. I don't know when…

Continue ReadingBack from North Korea!

Obama’s missed North Korea opportunity

When I first saw this picture, reading in the New York Times how "In South Korea Visit, Obama Visits Border and Warns North," I thought little of it, until I thought back to my earlier post on leadership opportunities for U.S. Presidents. I consider visiting a militarized border admirable and addressing North Korea important. But standing behind bulletproof glass is nothing like the speeches of Kennedy and Reagan. Maybe North Korea doesn't earn the same priority of the Soviet Union during the cold war, but it's a nuclear power that no one wants to keep as is. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH6nQhss4Yc[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtYdjbpBk6A[/youtube] Times…

Continue ReadingObama’s missed North Korea opportunity

The slides from my North Korea talk at Columbia Business School

Saturday's talk on North Korea at Columbia Business School went great -- a full room, an attentive audience, and great questions at the end. I didn't leave as much time for questions as I wish I had, but the organizer told me people told her they liked the talk a lot. Several people asked for copies of the slides so I'm posting them here instead of sending multiple emails.

Continue ReadingThe slides from my North Korea talk at Columbia Business School