Browsing: Human Nature

“Donovan Campbell is a decorated military officer and a young Fortune 500 executive whose lessons about leadership and teamwork came the hard way, through three combat deployments—two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.” ~RHSpeakers.com I recently had the privilege of sharing the stage with Donovan Campbell. And I was struck by his description of true [...]

Oh, the Super Bowl. I am always bemused by Super Bowl Sunday, and not just because I’m indifferent (yes, it’s true, I’m afraid I am) to football. It’s the social ritual of the event that gets me thinking. This past New Year’s Eve I spent the evening curled up on the sofa with my husband. [...]

I met some really incredible people at last week’s TED conference, and Rabbi David Wolpe was one of them. Here he is on the power of solitude: “When he was a child, the Seer of Lublin (later a famous Hasidic master) used to go off into the woods by himself. When his father, worried, asked him [...]

One of the pieces of my recent TED talk that has attracted the most interest is the idea that the world’s major religions feature stories of seekers (Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus…) who go off, by themselves, to the wilderness, where they have revelations that they then bring back to the community. No solitude, no revelations. [...]

Here’s the question that comes up every holiday season, sometimes explicitly, often not: “Is there a God?” You already know the answers. Some say yes, others say no, and then we argue about it ceaselessly. But here’s a different way to look at it: through the lens of “basic beliefs.” A basic belief is one [...]

Do you find it easy to mimic other people? Do you ever act friendly to people you dislike? When you’re uncertain how to act in a social situation, do you look to the behavior of others for cues? Do you often seek the advice of your friends to choose movies, books, or music? If you [...]

  “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.” The Swiss philosopher Max Picard said that, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd repeated it yesterday in a much-discussed column on the power of silence. She also shares this quote, which I love, from Michel Haznavicius, the director of [...]