A week ago, I received a message from a blog reader. He commented that my entries have been longer of late, and while he tried reading, he was lazy to continue on. He suggested I should create shorter versions of my articles for busy and lazy people like him. For perspective, my guest posts on

This is not a post about teaching, but teaching is what I do and what I know best, and this post is about thinking about what we do. People often wonder if I find it frustrating to be a university instructor. I teach topics that students resist a lot – in Women’s Studies, I teach with…

In a comment on my recent post about breaking up, someone asked if I’d write a follow-up about staying together. I’ve actually written about successful relationships before, based less on my own experience than on the work of relationship psychologists, so I’ll just refer you there if…

A few weeks ago, I wrote a few articles about starting a business based on something you love doing and are passionate about. I received several responses from people saying they weren’t sure how to go about figuring out what they were most passionate about or how to find their true purpose. So I’m dedicating…

At the beginning of the semester, I asked my students a simple question. See, I teach an unusual class, a core requirement that fulfills not just a social science or humanity requirement but also fulfills my university’s diversity requirement. In practical terms, that means that students working on satisfying their general education requirement can take…

Photo courtesy of Libby What do you think of this phrase: “The Joy of Apathy”? It sounds like such a clashing contradiction: how can joy, which is associated with happiness and passion, be found in the opposite stoicism of apathy? While joy and apathy certainly aren’t the same, they often work together and…

Releasing this a day late. Monday was a holiday in Hong Kong, where our head office is, so there was nobody around to upload the podcast file. My apologies! This week I talked with Arvind Devalia, author of Get the Life You Love and Live It, about finding your life’s purpose and pursuing…

Last Thursday, I wrote a column here called “Why Work?” I was hoping that we could break away from thinking about the income we tend to quickly associate with jobs and working for a living, and think about some other motivators, and some other satisfiers. Yes, income is a necessity of life, and I…

Imagine something with me for a moment. You are unbelievably wealthy and debt-free. You don’t have to work for the income it brings you, but still, you do work. Because you aren’t concerned with the amount of your paycheck, you are able to choose the work you want to do for the pure joy and…

Remember “management by objective?” In the early years of my own management career, management by objective was the single-minded battle cry for business. It was a time when we took certain things for granted, like the hard work ethic of our staff; with few exceptions, dependability and reliability was pretty much a workplace-entry given. Little wonder that…