The following are a few hard-won lessons about partners, people, and relationships, learned along a long and bumpy road. You can’t do a good deal with a bad partner. I repeat this because it is worth repeating. Whenever I find a business, a marriage, or a group struggling financially, I begin looking for the bad […]

I like when Robert says to be true to your brand and to yourself. He’s also right when he says you cannot be all things to all people if you want to be a brand. You have to decide what it is you want to be known for. You have to be true to yourself. […]

I like to think of the word FOCUS as Follow One Course Until Successful. My favorite two words of that acronym are these: until successful. Focus, represented by the index finger, is essential in developing your Midas Touch, and the focus must be about bringing out the best in you. Focus is also power measured […]

For ages, people have debated if leaders are born or made. So too goes the debates about emotional intelligence. Are people born with certain levels of empathy, for example, or do they acquire empathy as a result of life’s experiences? The answer is both. Scientific inquiry strongly suggests that there is a genetic component to […]

IQ and emotional intelligence are not opposing competencies, but rather separate ones. We all mix intellect and emotional acuity; people with a high IQ but low emotional intelligence (or low IQ and high emotional intelligence) are, despite the stereotypes, relatively rare. Indeed, there is a slight correlation between IQ and some aspects of emotional intelligence- […]

For those of you who are looking to be entrepreneurs or to grow your entrepreneurial business into something bigger and better that makes a greater impact, this is an important consideration. Every minute counts. Here´s my rule of thumb, no pun intended: If you can count the amount of time you put into a project […]

In recent years a growing a group of psychologist from Yale Robert Sternberg and Peter Salovey have come to similar conclusions, agreeing with Gardner that the old concepts of IQ revolved around a narrow band of linguistic and math skills, and that doing well on IQ tests was most directly a predictor of success in […]

A word about what I refer to under the rubric emotion, a term whose precise meaning psychologists and philosophers have quibbled over for more than a century. In its most literal sense, the Oxford English Dictionary defines emotion as “any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling, passion; any vehement or excited mental state.” I take […]

Peer pressure from the educational system itself is often overlooked. In fact, I get strange looks when I bring it up. We forget that education is a multi-billion-dollar industry driving to earn its revenue just like any other industry. Although I just used the word “industry,” that’s probably the wrong term. I say that because […]

Energy, drive, cockeyed optimism, entrepreneurial and religious zeal, Yankee ingenuity, messianism, and arrogance- these traits have long been attributed to an “ American character,” But given how closely they overlap with the hypomanic profile, they might be better understood as expressions of an American temperament, shaped in large part by our rich concentration of hypomanic […]