Category: Life Lessons

Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. In many ways, Rosh Hashanah is like the day after the secular New Year—when we think about the previous year and make resolutions for how to be better. Making resolutions can feel overwhelming. It’s exhausting to examine an entire year and think about how to live a better life, but our Rabbi reminded us that growth doesn’t have to happen all at once—it can be a gradual, steady process.

How does a leader create things? I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that a leader can have an idea and then get a group of people together and create something new. Something didn’t exist, and then magically it does. In 2006 there wasn’t an iPhone and then, magically, in 2007 there was. How does that happen? In this post, I’ll look at different models of leadership and how the best leaders don’t seem to be leading at all.

This has been an extremely hard year for us Jews. On October 7th over 1,200 were killed and over 200 were taken hostage in the most brutal attack on our people since the Holocaust. Jews were attacked in their homes and at a peace-loving music festival. Survivors were dragged from their homes, tortured, and taken to Gaza, where they faced months of terror in captivity.

I used to wonder if my local paper, the New York Times, was biased. This would happen when the paper was to far right, or left, of where I thought it should be. I felt that the paper was twisting the facts to get its viewpoint across. I thought, “Why didn’t they just tell the truth?! Why not just tell me the facts?!”

The Times magazine had a great piece on New York’s marijuana problem. The piece centers around the problem of how the industry should be regulated. On the one hand, having too much regulation allows illegal shops to pop up. However, the author points out that regulation is important when talking about addictive and harmful products.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey emphasizes that to communicate effectively, we must “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.” This principle is essential for building strong relationships. Covey teaches that empathic listening involves deeply understanding another person’s perspective before offering your own input, which fosters trust and effective communication.

A study published last year quantifies how social media platforms like TikTok create digital peer pressure and use it to their own advantage. Kids feel compelled to use these platforms because their friends are on then even though it makes them feel worse.

Why are our kids using social media so much when there are piles of evidence that it’s bad for them? This isn’t the classic generational clash where parents disapprove of the new-fangled gadgets the kids have. Instead, it’s about how these tools are hijacking their social worlds and enabling a new form of peer pressure.