Search Inside Yourself with Chade-Meng Tan
Chade-Meng Tan is an amazing guy. He started out as an engineer at Google, but his current title is Jolly Good Fellow with a job description that reads, “Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace.” As part of that mission, he developed a personal growth curriculum at Google called “Search Inside Yourself.” With his new […]
Friday on Office Hours: Why do some kids succeed and others fail?
That’s the question at the center of a fascinating new book by New York Times Magazine and This American Life contributor Paul Tough. It’s called How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound). And Tough will be talking about it, and taking your questions, on […]
The Storytelling Animal: 4 questions for Jonathan Gottschall
Have you heard the one about . . . ? Chances are, by the time you’ve reached this blog post, you’ve already heard dozens of stories in your day. Before you go to sleep, you’ll encounter dozens more. And you might desire some of these stories so deeply that you’ll pay for them. As a […]
How to avoid being “netflixed”: 5 questions for Saul Kaplan
My pal Saul Kaplan is a self-confessed innovation junkie. That’s all he seems to think, talk, and tweet about (with occasional detour for Boston sports teams.) He’s the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory in Providence and the proprietor of the most excellent annual conference of the same name. Now he’s taken […]
Can you launch a startup with just 100 bucks?
Later this month, Facebook is planning a ninety billion dollar IPO. Let’s write out that number so we glimpse its enormity: $90,000,000,000. Whoa. Chris Guilliebeau thinks Facebook is cool. But he urges the rest of us to concentrate on a smaller number: a hundred bucks. Let’s write out that one, too. $100. See? It’s a […]
3 outstanding books for your spring reading list
Over the last few months, I’ve had the privilege of reading three truly outstanding books. None are about business or work per se — but all are amazing and worth your time. The first is Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in the Mumbai Undercity. Boo, a New Yorker writer, spent three years […]
How to move people with two irrational questions
Unless you’re a hermit in a cave somewhere (and if so, how are you reading this blog?), you’re probably in a position to influence someone in your circle – children, a significant other, your co-workers, your boss – several times a day. Lately I’ve been digging into this broad question of how of we move […]
50 centuries of work = 5 important lessons
Cornell professor Karl Pillemer admits he’s an advice junkie.  Yet even amid the groaning self-help shelves at his local bookstore, he felt something was missing. As he asks in 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans (Amazon, BN.com, IndieBound), “Why, if we have so many professional advice givers, are so many people […]
The power of habits — and the power to change them
Human beings, we’ve been told, are creatures of habit. If we do something one way on Tuesday, odds are we’ll do that same thing the same way on Wednesday. Sometimes that helps us. Think about those who floss regularly and can’t imagine otherwise. Other times, it can rot our brains and hollow our souls. Think […]
Would getting rid of cash make our lives easier and better?
On Sunday night I did something that, when you stop and think about it for a moment, was weird. Accompanied by SaulonSports, I drove to Ray’s Hell Burger to pick up dinner for ourselves and our fellow Pinks. We asked for five burgers. And the folks behind the counter gave them to us in exchange for — […]