Say you live in Greenwich, Connecticut, during, oh, the early 1850s. Your older brother left home a few years back to try his luck in the California gold fields. Like the vast majority of those who risked everything to go west, he came up empty. Now he’s stranded, working in some dive on the San Francisco waterfront, pulling steam beer for the other would-be millionaires nursing their dashed dreams. Click to continue »

Audio mp3 of this article It’s after Christmas dinner at your brother’s house. The fire is crackling in the fireplace.  Kids are running around. You’re drinking egg nog, feeling warm all over.

Your brother stands up and says “Folks, I’m hoping you had a good time tonight.  I’ll have your bills by the door, please pay before you leave. We take cash or Visa.”

There’s a nervous laugh or two and then you notice, he’s not kidding. There’s a stack of invoices and a card swiping machine on the foyer table. Click to continue »

For starters, we all know that good sex can be fun, romantic, exciting, and something that makes most consenting adults feel warm and fuzzy all over.  Over the years we have interviewed thousands of successfully married couples, and most report a reasonable degree of satisfaction with their sex life.  But here is our most important research finding concerning this issue – no marriage was ever saved or made successful because the couple had a great sex life! Click to continue »

(Editor’s Note: The Start-up Chronicles is a weekly feature giving an inside view of the trials of a bootstrapped start-up – The Cost Savings Guy. CEO and founder Bruce Judson is also the author of “Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building A Successful Business on Your Own” and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.)

As a direct marketer, I am a strong believer in experiments – even when I expect them to fail.

The ideal test is small, involving limited time or resources, and providing an indication of whether I should invest further time and energy.  It is, in some ways, an iterative process, where each piece of learning leads me to effectively increase my commitment to a specific strategy – or lets me know that my time is better spent elsewhere. Ultimately, there’s no substitute for first-hand experience. Click to continue »

I’ve just found this excellent Fast Company article from last year challenging the idea that there is a ‘tipping point’ in fashions or trends driven by small numbers of highly connected people who have a disproportionate influence over which new products or ideas become popular.

The piece is based on work by Duncan Watts, a physicist and sociologist, who created numerous computer simulations of how trends move through society in a similar way to how medical scientists model how diseases spread. Click to continue »

Snoring, choking, gasping, and pauses in breathing while sleeping: all signs of obstructive sleep apnea, a common disorder thought to affect up to 1 in 5 adults (and 3% of children). Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the throat collapses inward during sleep, resulting in blockage of air flow to the lungs. It often results in people waking up not feeling refreshed despite having gotten a full night’s sleep, and to suffer from excessive daytime sleepiness. It also causes a number of health problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, and negatively affects development, behavior and school performance in kids. Click to continue »

Can we really tell who will succeed in a business competition before we even hear their ideas? The answer may surprise you.

As it turns out, what counts most may not be what you say, but rather how you say it. There is a certain style of social interaction – one that our research group has identified quantitatively – that is highly predictive of success in a variety of situations. Click to continue »

I was meaning to get around to writing this for some time, but other things got in the way. Like many of you, I had to google some nonsense, watch a re-run of the CNN news, look out the window, ruminate a little about why I’m not getting this done. And then it occurred to me, JUST DO IT.

OK. If you procrastinate then you realize you are not alone. Most of us procrastinate some of the time. There’s a true story about a graduate student who took over twenty years to finish her dissertation-and the topic was “procrastination”. Really. Do I look like the kind of guy to make this up? Click to continue »

Monk, peace activist and author Thich Naht Hahn has long written that mindfulness can make for a more peaceful and contented existence. But did you know that it can make for better, more pleasurable, sex?

Mindfulness refers to the practice of focusing on the present moment. Some Eastern philosophers encourage applying mindfulness to walking meditation – specifically that, as people walk slowly around a room in their house or along a street in their neighborhood, they pay attention to how their feet feels in their shoes or on the floor and how the air feels on their arms, how the room or outside air smells and any sounds (a dripping faucet? a chirping bird?) that may grace one’s environment. Practicing mindfulness can help to minimize distracting thoughts, to bask in quiet and to get away from thinking about the past or the future.

Applying mindfulness to sex is another journey indeed. Click to continue »

The arrival of a new year signals new expectations.  And when you feel stuck in anything from a relationship to career decisions or even family matters, you may feel more than a little blue.

It’s easy to be swept away by a whole cocktail of negative emotions.  The reason for this is that most people don’t want to bring old baggage into a feeling of newness.

There are many possible ways to rid yourself of feeling like you are spinning your tires in muck.  One regiment that I have found works comes from core martial arts techniques. These concepts have helped me find the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel many times over the years, and I want to share them with you.  My hope is that they will serve you well. Click to continue »