For many people, the term "political" has a very negative connotation, as the closest link to our daily lives appears in the term "office politics", which isn't the primary definition of the word politics. Here is the full definition of politics from the Oxford dictionary:

1 [usually treated as singular] the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power:

• the activities of governments concerning the political relations between states
• the academic study of government and the state
• a particular set of political beliefs or principles
• (often the politics of) the ...

I just finished "The 48 Laws of Power," which - as a former hater of learning history - I have learned to love the lessons that history can provide. As my next challenge, I've started reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius recently to continue challenging myself to learn more from the books that is spend my spare time with. Here is a particularly good quote:

"Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how many times the gods have given you days of grace, and yet you do not use them. Now is it high time to perceive the ...

In Charlie O'Donnell's post titled "On Patterns", it is easy to realize the subtle social behaviors that we encounter on a daily basis, such as familiarity, outright bias, and obliviousness:

"In the same way, I understand why a few extra neurons fire when you approach a business office and the person at the front desk is male.  I understand the pause people feel when you look at a startup bio page and you notice that the CTO is female.  I don't think you are a bad person for noticing this difference.  In fact, I'd venture to ...

What are the determining factors for an individual's success? Parents will say that college is a pre-requisite for success, but people like Peter Thiel would like to convince the world otherwise. Sean "P. Diddy" Combs would probably say that it comes down to hard work and hustle, but how can that be qualified or quantified? How can you compare the success of Warren Buffett to that of Bill Gates? I would say that there are common threads among all of the people mentioned.

Success is the intersection of three immutable major tenets: Ability, Interest, and Opportunity. The lack of ...

This put a huge smile on my face.

Last year, I planned a little something special for my beautiful then-girlfriend on a random Saturday in the middle of August. I truly couldn't have done it without the help of Shana's and my close friends and I wanted to thank all of them for helping us make it such a special day. 

Here's how it turned out:

Let me know what you think!

On February 4th, 2010, I had the opportunity to attend the TEDxBigApple event in Manhattan. As expected, the all day event was truly inspirational and seemed to have an energy about it. In order to attend, each person was required to submit an application and I was lucky enough to be invited to attend. A major result of this process was that it wasn't just the speakers who were extremely interesting to hear, but the finely curated audience also brought their own stories and life experiences to learn from. 

I got a chance to meet a father and son ...

I typically don't task myself with a New Year's resolution, especially given the fact that resolutions are like diets: they always end up being temporary. Like clockwork, the gym is packed for the first one and a half months of the year, with only the regulars continuing to go for the remainder of the year. For this reason, I'm not calling this a resolution; I'm calling it my mission: I am going to get stronger.

I love Crossfit. For those of you who have no idea what Crossfit is, check this out:

I've been a ...

I got my inspiration for this post by reading an article online titled "Don't Pity the Rentennials: Why Not Owning a Home Is a Good Thing." Over the last few years, I have thought about this question a lot, but it was until my last apartment that I realized the hidden benefits of renting. 

My previous apartment in Jersey City, NJ, was the owner's duplex unit in a gorgeous brownstone. It had a back yard, a basement for storage, and was super spacious. In short, it was a great place to live in and I loved it... until ...

Amazing article:

How Many People Can Manhattan Hold

Image Credit: Wikipedia 

I recently read an article on The Verge - which is my favorite tech blog - about how Microsoft is re-branding it's Zune music service to leverage its Xbox brand (article here). The change in branding makes a huge amount of sense, since MSFT is no longer producing Zune branded hardware, but it also got me asking, "Why would they be converging all of their products to 'XBox Live'?" Let's look into the history a bit...

The original Xbox was code-named "DirectX box" and subsequently shortened to Xbox before it was released in 2001. Primarily billed as a standalone gaming ...

Image Credit

In Part 2, we presented a few anecdotal examples of how we would apply the stakeholder framework in the real world. With the framework in mind, it allows us to get some insight into answering the following questions:

• What makes a locality improve or decline (the first derivative: rate of change)?
• What are the factors that truly impact the trajectory of a given neighborhood (the second derivative: the acceleration or deceleration of growth)?

While there are many social factors that impact economic change, I'd begin by taking a fiscal approach and then deriving some of the social ...

In part 1, we discussed all of the stakeholders that exist in our model and the roles which each stakeholder plays. This part zooms out from the framework and looks at the world as the sum of the components in a particular locality - the neighborhood, the city, and the state, to name a few examples. A good way to represent an individual locality is to draw a border around a particular area that we'd like to look at. Once the border is drawn, it is much easier to break each stakeholder down and then add everything back up to ...

I'm happy to say that - after lots of hours of reading books, searching through google, and pounding my head on the desk - this is my first entry to my shiny new blog!

In December of 2011, I gave myself a challenge to learn about the web and I went about it by learning Django (by my friends Tim and Red's recommendations), HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Keep in mind that I was starting from absolute scratch - I knew NOTHING about the web. The closest I had come to knowing anything about websites was back in the late 90's ...