You Need to Stand for Something

Today, I read a story in the Washington Post about a girl who recently resigned from West Point and is going to Yale. She resigned from West Point because she is gay and the school will kick her out if it learns that she is gay. Tired of compromising between what she believed was right and wrong, she resigned to protest the policy and be consistent with her own internal compass. When I started reading the story, I immediately thought—she’s probably transferring to Harvard or Yale. Sure enough, I was not surprised when I learned later in the article that that was where she was going. Why wasn’t I surprised? Because a school like Yale probably receives a couple of hundred transfer applications for every spot it has open (very few people drop out of Yale). In order to get one of those spots you need to stand for something. How memorable is it to have a good grade point average? Lots of people have good grades. Very few people stand for something. The people [Read more]

How to Survive and Succeed in Your Job

Working in a company or any organization is often competitive and scary. The reason that it can be so scary is because around you there are so many unknowns, and there is so much information that you do not have access to. Having access to information, both about how to perform your job and also about the state of the company you work for, is crucial to your survival. I love to read the business section of the paper each day. While I am not an investor, I think someone who is familiar with the field could make [Read more]

The Focus of the Group You Are in Determines the Kind of Person You Become

When I was around 7 years old, an international touring group of forty or so young singers and dancers called Up with People came to my Detroit elementary school. The group put on a spellbinding show that mesmerized me. I went to a relatively small elementary school that must have had fewer than two hundred students in it. The fact that I still remember the show—and its positive message–more than thirty years later, is a testament to how good this show was. For months after the show, I remember kids from our school sang the songs the group had performed. [Read more]

Weight Loss, Security Guards, Hard Work and Your Career

In the Midwest, where I am from, many of the men and women there tend to start getting bigger and bigger, and wider and wider, when they hit their 30s.  I am not saying they all do, of course, but there is a definite trend there that I believe is much, much more “pronounced” than in other areas of the country. On the block where I grew up, a group of these women got together and decided to do something about it by exercising.  For hours each day, in a group of five or more, they would walk around [Read more]