January 2011 Archives

People use too much lingo. What do I mean by too much? I mean it when big or out-of-context words confuse more than illuminate or create meaning. Everybody knows it, we still do it more than we mean to. I'm going to examine the issue from a few perspectives.

Having a background in science I see a lot of scientific sounding language where it seems people use it more to sound scientific than to convey meaning. Often they end up sounding less scientific. Science isn't the only place where people get lingo from, but it's a good example.

Today I read a New York Times article on How Meditation May Change the Brain. The article is okay, but it illustrates how people misuse information and confuse it for knowledge and wisdom.

We all know the brain changes -- if it didn't we would be the same persons our whole lives. Obvious, right? I prefer to call those changes in our brains learning, growing, and gaining experience. If through meditation you learn calmness and empathy, you can say you learned calmness and empathy.

Here's how the article says it:

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants' meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

If you are a brain researcher who studies how brains work, you might be interested in how the physical structure of the brain changes, but to a lay person, saying more than people who meditated learned calmness and empathy doesn't add meaning. Talking about hippocampuses and amygdalas yields more information but likely less knowledge to a lay person.

In fact, I predict the more someone knows about the brain, the more he or she would say the field is so young whatever research they have creates little meaningful knowledge. They're gathering it in the hopes future researchers, with much more information, can create meaning from it.

People who know little about the brain make wide, sweeping generalizations from little information that people who know better refrain from. Pseudo-scientific lingo emboldens them to generalize and, worse, gives them confidence in their poorly supported extrapolations. I'm willing to bet no one knows meaningful relations between gray matter, hippocampuses, and such that is willing to bet what they know won't change in the next five years.

For people interested in improving their lives -- why else would they consider taking up a new practice like meditation -- the most meaningful message I could think of is something like "people who meditate say it helps them decrease their anxiety and stress." If you want to be scientific you could add, "You can try it yourself and see if you get the same results." Testing an observation is science. People have lost sight that you don't need huge FDA-approved double-blind controlled experiments to learn about the world. You can just do something and observe. That's what Darwin, Newton, Galileo, and so on did. Using big words is not science. It's just using big words.

I don't begrudge the author, editor, or publisher. Their jobs are to sell newspapers and the message that people who meditate say it calms them and you could get the same benefit is old and doesn't sell papers. Still, it's a more meaningful message.

For another example, I talk a lot about differences between physical pleasure and emotional reward. I won't get into the differences here, but they aren't the same thing. You can sense in yourself how your emotional system reacts differently to, say, eating a delicious mango, which is physically pleasurable, and, say, finishing a marathon, which may bring no physical pleasure but may be very emotionally rewarding.

Feeling, exploring, and understanding your emotions, motivations, and feelings can raise your self-awareness. Every now and then someone says something like "Physical pleasure is dopamine. Emotional reward is serotonin" and then sits back as if they just indicated they know everything on the subject. I'm sure dopamine and serotonin are related, but we hardly know anything about them, how they work, how they influence other parts of the brain, etc.

The worst thing is the lingo keeps people from thinking and experiencing more. People with the most to learn block themselves the most.

Everyone has something to say about the environment, the economy, and ecology. People believe in human caused global warming or they don't, but they have something to say about it. They believe improving the environment will ruin the economy or save it or something. Everyone has something to say.

One major trend I see is based on the interests of the source. If the person speaking comes from the business world there is a good chance he or she will communicate that others' environmental concerns are overblown, things aren't as bad as they say, you should keep doing what you're doing, and buying his or her product or service will make things better. If the person comes from a science or nature focused world, he or she will give you facts about the problems, possibly potential solutions, but not connect it with your life. I mean, he or she might suggest you turn off the lights when you aren't in the room or switch to a smaller car, but you can't observe the effects of those changes in the world -- only to your life. If you liked bigger cars, they seem to make your life worse (until you learn to appreciate less waste).

Nearly every book on the topics I've read suffers from either self-serving business interests that disregard others or well meaning appreciation of nature that makes you feel bad.

Limits to Growth is the best book on the subject I've read. It's goal isn't to give you answers -- there are too many assumptions and beliefs for that -- but to give you a way to think about it. It covers the topics I consider relevant in the ways that make sense. For some reason it's the only book I've found that does so -- all others mix in the flaws I described above.

It reasonably and thoughtfully looks at the relevant factors, explains its assumptions, and considers a range of those assumptions. The authors perspective is based in systems theory, a subject I'll have to write about in a future entry, so their goal is thoroughness, of course accepting that the complexity of the situation is beyond human comprehension.

I hope to find someone to read the book so I can talk to him or her about it. The book doesn't have a lot of math or science, but it has some. I don't know how easy it would be to understand for someone who doesn't know what a system of linear equations is. The authors don't mention them, but they're in there. Maybe the book is better not knowing.

Sadly few people understand much math or science, so I don't know many people I could hope would read the book. Nonetheless, I recommend it to anyone and everyone. If you've read it, I'd love to talk about it.

An incredibly useful perspective in some half-baked notes to a friend. I'll develop them more in future posts. Feedback and criticism appreciated.

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You wrote about lying as an example of a "bad trait". I'd like to suggest another perspective (generalizable from just lying to other aspects of apparent lack of empathy): that the reason people communicate is not to convey truths. Evaluating people according to truths and lies holds them to impossible standards that hurts oneself in the long run by creating judgmental emotions and decreasing your ability to influence people who are hurting you.

A perspective I find more helpful is that we, like all animals, communicate to influence others to help us in our goals. All animals communicate and all animals deceive each other, prey, mates, predators, etc. Animals imply they have poison when they don't, that they're wounded when they're not, that they're stronger than they are, etc. We imply we have greater status than we do, that we're taller than we are, that we have more resources than we do, etc. Social animals like us deceive each other relatively more because we take up more of each others' lives. We keep track of each others' reputations and credibility more than most species to help minimize our losses due to others' deception.

Focusing on truths and lies leads to labeling, blaming, looking for flaws, moralizing. Like all humans, you deceive others a lot more than you think you do, unless by "almost always 100% honest" you mean a lot less than 100%. When you evaluate people by standards they don't fit, you create emotions like indignation, self-righteousness, and the like. That's my experience, anyway. I don't like feeling those emotions and I find they decrease my chances of influencing others.

I recommend just assuming people are communicating with you to influence you to help themselves, just like you are with them. I predict their and your deceptions will bother you less or not at all (not that you seemed that bothered by them). The point is not to try to stop others from deceiving you. I see no value in tilting at windmills, which creates frustration and leads to futility. You might as well try to fly by stopping gravity. My point -- I shouldn't bury it at the end of a paragraph in the middle, but here it is -- is not if you can improve the people around you -- good luck trying to change people based on your evaluations of them lying to you -- but how you allow your life, particularly your emotional well-being, to be affected by other people being who they are.

In this perspective, if you discover someone's deception hurt you, you end up not getting as angry, though you will likely downgrade your assessment of their reputation and credibility and trust them less. If you want people to deceive you less, you'll be more effective if you respond thoughtfully and less judgmentally or reactively, which this perspective helps. You communicate about what people are communicating about rather than judging and moralizing. Your emotions will be more about curiosity and helpfulness than suspicion and self-righteousness.

Maybe I'm creating a false dichotomy, but I'll choose rewarding emotions and effectiveness influencing others over frustration and annoyance based on judging people by impossible standards, motivating them to hold their ground.

Closing credits now commonly stretch for ten minutes. Early movies had closing credits of ten people. Why do we still have them?

The typical answer is to credit the people who contributed, but that method seems ineffective: one name out of thousands is nearly invisible, it's only visible while watching the movie, and they're unsearchable. Meanwhile, every movie has a web page but those pages rarely list the full closing credits.

If the goal of closing credits is to credit the people who contributed, won't posting them online serve that goal better? If the goal is to give time to show bloopers, why not just show the bloopers? (The same goes for tv shows)

One of the great lessons I learned from my father was that when people talk about how they spend their time, they're talking about priorities. As he put it, "When people say they don't have time to do something, they mean they prioritized something else higher. People have time to do anything. The question is if what they put aside to do something."

Internalized over the years, the perspective seems obvious to me now, but it clarifies. If you don't know your priorities you don't know how to spend your time, so you can work long hard hours and achieve little.

The main value in the perspective for me is that it enables you to do what you want. Time flows as time flows, outside of your control or influence. If you think the flow of time determines what or how much you can do, you're stuck because you can't do anything about it.

If you recognize your priorities determine your actions and what you can achieve, then you decide what you can work on and achieve. Understanding your priorities is under your control, as is the choice to act on them. Very empowering.

A secondary value in this perspective is it helps you understand others (and yourself) better, which is always calming. When someone tells you he or she didn't do something for lack of time, you know he or she valued something else more (assuming competence on his or her part). You may not agree with his or her values if you think he or she should have done it, but at least you know what to deal with.

Urban Dictionary has the best definitions for my name. I'm too lazy to look up if they make up awesome definitions for everyone, but check out yours in case they do to brighten your day.

Here are the first few definitions of Josh:

Josh - He is a fun loving guy really funny and can make anyone laugh.He is very quiet at first and seems shy but when you get to know him you will fall in love.He has very good style and always looks handsome.He also always smells really good :)



Josh - Coolest kid in the world, very popular, girls are all over him usually most of the time, loves p***y



Josh - Cool Guy, likes to making up songs, real funny, good with girls.

person:He's so funny!
Person:Well he's a Josh.


Josh - The most amazing guy in the world. Best boyfriend you can ever get. He's sweet, intelligent, sexy even though he doesnt think so. Easy to fall in love with. Adores his girlfriend and never stops telling her how much he loves her. Gave her his heart and never wants it back. He loves making people smile and laugh and is good at it because he's so funny. Enjoys comedies and is the sweetest guy you will ever meet. Nows how to have fun, and cares more about romance than sexual things. Hes just complete and utter awesomeness :)

"Who is that insanely sweet boy?"
"That's my boyfriend, Josh, be jealous bitch"


I can't make this stuff up, but I love it! What's your definition?

In college I volunteered at a soup kitchen near campus, in the basement of the church with the big red doors on 114th and Broadway. I did it independently of the student groups that organized students to interact with the community beyond Columbia, but I volunteered more regularly than anyone else, so they invited me to the annual August retreat for the student organizers.

On the way back from upstate we decided to get off at the Metro-North stop at 125th Street and walk: a half-dozen white and Asian Ivy League undergraduates who volunteered in college walking through Harlem on a Sunday morning -- make of us what you will. Walking along 125th Street, passing by some apparently boarded up storefront, I heard music. I opened the doors and poked my head in to find a storefront church -- gospel music, bass, drums, and keyboards, clapping, "amens" and "praise the lords", ... the works. Uplifting sights and sounds.

As I took in the sights and sounds, two things happened: my friends had circled back and poked their heads in too. A guy in the back (nearest the entrance, where we were) saw us and beckoned us in. What a dilemma -- what an amazing experience, but how awkward and self-conscious we would feel. What am I saying? There was no dilemma. The awkwardness was worth it.

In we went, as best we could trying not to feel self-conscious joining in the singing, clapping, and dancing to music we'd mostly only heard through recordings or on TV. Afterward, they invited us for lunch upstairs -- fried chicken, collard greens with ham, and salad!

Now fast forward to October 2010. A friend and I were taking the M60 back from LaGuardia. He's a drinking buddy, but we were coming back from giving a presentation. We weren't looking for a life experience, just to go home. The bus was going slowly on 125th Street so we decided to walk. I told him that story from twenty years before. In the intervening years I remember seeing the church on occasion, but never on a Sunday morning, so I didn't know if it was still operating. And I couldn't remember the last time I had been on 125th Street. So we looked in storefronts as we walked along because, who knows what you might find.

Lo and behold! Ahead I saw a sign (not that kind of sign) with the name of the church and its white bird symbol refreshing my memory that this place was the same one from before. I hadn't thought of it while telling my friend the story, but it turns out the time was Sunday morning.

The church was still going and in service just then. We popped our heads in, they invited us in, and in we went, suitcases rolling behind us. They led us to sit in the front instead of the back where we wanted, I guess to motivate participation. Actually, everything they did motivated participating and made leaving difficult: giving us bibles, showing us the sections to follow along with, inviting us to participate in being saved, and so on.

In fact, the church was holding its fortieth or forty-ninth year anniversary service. We sang and danced and clapped and joined in the uplifting experience. Everybody seemed to enjoy our participation -- they kept inviting us to stay after the service ended. We politely declined (well, I did, my friend found it difficult to decline as much as they persisted in inviting), they had given us so much already we couldn't accept more.

On the way out, though, I told one of the organizers of my experience twenty years earlier, drawing a small crowd to hear the story. They seemed to love hearing it. I look forward to visiting the church again -- it was welcoming, uplifting, friendly, and not too persistent and insistent on keeping us.

I was helping a colleague install some software on an Apple computer a week or two ago. In the process we had to install a c compiler, which was Free Software. I don't remember the details, but somehow Apple had set it up so he had to register with Apple to install the software. I'm sure there was a way around it, but Apple set it up that way.

There's a scene in Silence of the Lambs where Anthony Hopkins is in a jail cell in the middle of a room and hands a file to Jodie Foster after making her reveal secrets about herself. When he hands it to her, he purposefully brushes his finger against hers -- a brilliantly directed small but revealing detail. She might not even have noticed the touch, but you realize how much he's engineered things just so he could do it. You also realize he got great pleasure from it, which makes it all the more creepy. He didn't have to do it, but he did. You could say it's no big deal to her just for their skin to touch for maybe a second. If it was an accident it would be no big deal. But it wasn't an accident, he made it that way. And he did help her get the job done, but he didn't have to make it personal, force her to reveal so much, or get pleasure out of manipulating her.

That's what working with Apple is like. Microsoft is similar but less subtle.

I have a friend who says he can voluntarily let go of emotions he doesn't want to hold on to anymore. I've let go of many things, but never in the moment from conscious intent. He sounds sincere, but frankly I doubt him.

Like telling an angry person to calm down, suggesting someone let go of something is counterproductive advice. Trying to let go of something voluntarily focuses your mind on it, often achieving the opposite of your goal.

Whenever I've let go of something important, I've always noticed it after the fact. One day I realize I haven't been thinking about some girl or dwelling on a past event for a while. I can't identify the time of letting go.

To let go of something, I find filling my mind with new stuff and crowding out the old stuff is more effective. If I have an itch I don't want to scratch, my best way for it not to bother me is to occupy my mind on something else. Thinking about the itch only makes it worse.

What creates value? Do things have inherent value?

Many parts of society value gold, money, status, and so on. But if you're hungry enough, those things will lose their value relative to a modest apple.

On the other hand, if your material needs are covered, a simple apple loses its value. Water and oxygen are necessary for life, but since they are nearly freely available at least to individuals reading these words, people take them for granted, which means they don't behave like they value them much.

My current working model is that things don't have inherent value. Value -- and for that matter meaning, purpose, importance, and related concepts -- comes from the person considering the thing in question. So a thing's value can change based on the person changing.

In particular, my current working model says that a thing's value comes from the emotions and motivations evoked in the person. A thing that evokes, say, long-term and complex emotions, like a relationship with a person or a hobby, that thing will have long-term and complex value. A thing that evokes short-term intense emotions, like a delicious meal or ski run, will have short-term intense value.

Talking about value, meaning, purpose, importance, and so on is talking about one's emotions. The more aware you are of your emotions, the more aware you are about your values and vice versa.

Many people are quick to say they don't judge. People seem to value not judging others. Come to think of it, I do.

People all too commonly say they aren't judgmental when someone else is judgmental about something they aren't. For example, when one person says "Americans are too fat," the other may say "Don't be so judgmental" or, more mildly, "I'm not so judgmental."

It's all too common because It's easy to say you don't judge when talking about other people's values that you don't share. It's more difficult when talking about your values. That is, the same person who is so live-and-let-live about things they don't care about may get incensed or enraged about things that do matter to them. If they think their thing is important not because it's their opinion but because they think absolute reality backs them up, they may never see the contradiction and even dig themselves in that much deeper.

For the past year or so I've found a few words -- more precisely, the concepts they represent -- to be un- or  counter-productive in most uses: right, wrong, good, bad, and evil. They are difficult to use without implying judgment -- in particular, judgment based on an absolute standard. Not using the words forces you to clarify your meaning, recognize that you are judging, and clarify the basis of your judgment.

For example, instead of saying "that's a good movie" you might say "I liked that movie." The first way, someone can object to because you're implying something absolute about a matter of taste. The second way shifts the attention to yourself. Any judgment or evaluation is based on your personal taste. People may not share your tastes, but few will argue that you aren't allowed your tastes.

Try not using the words for a week or month.

Some people like to give advice. Maybe everyone does, despite knowing how annoying it can be. Sometimes we think we can help so much or don't think of the other person's perspective enough that it feels worth it. We're all used to our thoughts preparing the advice: hoping to avoid stepping on toes, to avoid insulting, and so on.

The other person's annoyance is often justified. That is, our advice invites it. We may not think of it explicitly, but when we give unsolicited advice we imply "Your life isn't as good as it could be and I know better than you do how to live it." Who wouldn't be annoyed? Most people think they are living great lives. Since their values aren't the same as yours, they probably consider their life better than yours, no matter what you think.

Despite our best intentions, if we don't net out our desire to meddle from our intent to be helpful, giving unsolicited advice often motivates the other person to stick to their ways even more, the opposite of our intent. You never know how attached a person is to his or her ways, nor how accepting he or she will be to new ways.

I came up with advice for myself on giving unsolicited advice to others, no matter how great my advice feels:

Imagine you're advising a mother she isn't raising her child well and you want to tell her how to raise it better.

Most people aren't as attached to their ways as a mother to how she raises a child, but then nor will all mothers resist hearing advice. It's conservative advice, but I've done well by it. Maybe I've avoided helping a person or two who would have benefited from my advice, but I may just have motivated that person to stick to their ways. Or my way may not have helped them.

That I may have missed chances to help is speculative. What's for sure is that I didn't get people annoyed at me for keeping my mouth shut.

Jet lag knocks off more than just your sleep cycles. Since I've been jet lagged the past few days I've had the chance to notice.

Your body temperature is higher during the day and lower at night. When you're jet lagged, you'll find yourself lying in bed trying to sleep when your body temperature is high. Everyone I've asked about it has remarked that, yes, when they're jet lagged they remember throwing off all their covers because it's so hot. You may also find yourself unable to bundle up enough to keep yourself warm during the day.

Check it out next time your sleep cycles are off.

Update: Yup, last night I kept kicking off all the covers while wide awake. Today I'm shivering in a warm room, barely awake.

Despite ourselves, accepting things can demotivate as much as rejections can motivate us.

Physics, at its core, has always meant to me studying the most basic elements of our environment: space, time, matter, forces, charge, and so on. Though today I view experiment as its equal, in graduate school I wanted to study theory -- particle theory, in particular.

When I was choosing my direction in graduate school, my old undergraduate adviser pointed out to me how little money there was in theory. Without money, there were few positions. As he put it, studying theory was a route to Wall Street. From a physicist's point of view, and mine at the time, Wall Street meant defeat, mostly evidenced by how much money they had to pay you to be there.

So I went to work for experiment. I didn't realize that, no matter how uninterested I was in Wall Street later, I wasn't that interested in experiment then. Taking his advice led me to do something I didn't like for several years. His advice was sound based on what he knew of me. I wasn't aware enough of my interests to stick with them.

I ended up leaving physics anyway after working several years on something I liked less than what I wanted to do -- the worst of both worlds.

Doing something you don't enjoy or learn from in the hopes it will lead to something better later often leads you to dislike that thing and devalue what it gets you -- the exact opposite of your hopes. I could have learned the lesson to stick with what I loved with less loss of time.

Now I do what I love, enjoy or learn from the process (or both), and appreciate the outcome. Even if I don't enjoy the outcome, I don't regret what I did because I was enjoying myself, learning, or both.

Growing out of its start-up phase and in a recession, Submedia's needs expanded beyond what my skills could handle a few years after we incorporated -- physics trains you well to develop products, and passion will carry you far, but not knowing the value of a balance sheet and not even having taken a class in management, marketing, or finance can hold you back.

I wanted to keep working with the medium while no longer CEO. The company, having promised returns to its investors, was only interested in clearly profitable applications, so I looked into other directions and fell on creating art with it, which I came to love.

That I had negligible experience in creating art or expressing myself in a visual medium I saw as just a bigger challenge, an area for growth -- the whole point of doing it. If it was easy or didn't require new skills and growth, I wouldn't have done it.

So my early work relied on collaborating with others, particularly others from whose experience and skills I could learn. I got to work with a brilliant fashion photographer. His work was amazing and his connections fantastic. We did some shoots with stunningly talented and beautiful models. His stylist got dresses and bathing suits for the model costing tens of thousands of dollars.

We had a slight disconnect in that I was interested in developing as an artist and he was interested, as I understood, in finding commercial opportunities with a breakthrough medium. But I don't think I understood that difference then and, for that matter, I'm not sure how accurate that understanding is today.

In any case, one of the members of his team -- a great guy -- once suggested that to succeed I should keep working on what I was good at -- building the technology -- and leave the beauty for someone else, who was great at it already. From their perspective it made a lot of sense. From my perspective it was like the Penn department head lowering his expectations.

It affected me in the same way in more ways than one: I also used it as motivation to continue pursuing my art.

A PhD in physics is a challenge by any measure. Choosing to start the major in your junior year makes catching up that much harder. I felt I was always catching up, filling in details I missed having had to teach myself required classes from a textbook over the summer. Many physics majors know what they want to pursue when they start and finish college with twenty or thirty math and physics classes. Though I was always good at math and science, I hadn't yet learned that geekiness and nerdiness were orthogonal to coolness and had run away from the fields for fear of the emotions being made fun of in high school had caused.

The head of Penn's physics department, where I began my PhD, was a stern man, difficult to deal with for any student. I was struggling to keep up with my classmates, so dealing with him for me was that much more difficult.

When we passed once in the hallway in my second semester, he stopped me and said since I wasn't doing well, maybe it would be best if I didn't take such hard classes and took some undergrad classes instead. I think he even said this with other people around, overhearing a conversation nobody wants to hear.

At the time physics was one of my two passions (ultimate being the other). The suggestion to let up hit my ears like suggesting to give up. Looking back now, I can imagine good advice someone in his position could have given, but I don't remember such advice from him.

In any case, one of my fundamental principles of education is that the student rises to the level expected of him or her. For an educator to lower his expectations and ask the student to lower his is the opposite of education to me.

By contrast to that department head, I remember great encouragement from my adviser and a couple professors at Columbia's physics department. I felt more supported in that community. I got in touch with people at the department there, got my grades up, transferred back, and finished my degree there. In fact, after I took my qualifying exams there, I heard my scores were just below those of the students in some theory groups, who usually score highest.

There is a caveat to these motivating rejections. If the motivation you derive from them doesn't resonate with the motivations you'd have without them, you're operating reactively, moving in directions you wouldn't choose on your own. For example, I ended up leaving physics and may have continued farther than I would have absent that conversation. At the time I knew only my passion for physics, so I consider my decision sound. For that matter, going in new directions can bring more reward than you'd expect.

As always the foundation is awareness -- of your environment, beliefs, emotions, and behavior.

Ultimate Frisbee was one of the great passions of my life. I played for most of twenty years, competing at Nationals, Worlds, and playing with some of the best players in the game. I played in high school, though we didn't know the rules then. If you don't know the sport, do yourself a favor and find a way to watch one at the highest level. It's beautiful, incredibly athletic, and fun.

Joining Uptown Local, the Columbia College team, was one of the first things I did in college. My skills were terrible but my teammates' were amazing and my passion was great. While I knew others were better, I didn't know enough at the beginning to know how much of a beginner I was.

Sophomore year my skills had improved and many of the best players from the year before had graduated. One time we were playing a tightly competitive game. Everyone was excited. Well after halftime I hadn't played a point.

I pointed this out to Eli, one of our captains, asking when I would get to play. He said, diplomatically, that this was an important and tight game and he didn't know how to say it but when I covered a guy, he still got the disc.

What?!? I couldn't believe it. I suddenly became aware, with painful clarity, of one of the basic meanings of competition and that I wasn't competitive in an area I thought I was. Late in life for a lesson like this, but just as powerful.

Feeling red-faced with shame, I couldn't stand to be on the sideline. To that point I felt entitled to my share of playing time, but how could I argue with him? All I could do was head back to the van to stew in my pain and self-pity. Once on my own I couldn't help cry.

But more importantly I had to come face to face with this realization: if I wanted to play I'd have to earn it. Did I want to play for fun and get what playing time I could in games that didn't matter or did I want to earn my spot and play in the games that counted?

The answer was clear, and though the path was long, I decided then and there that I was going to get good at this sport -- that I was going to practice and train and learn and become a player a team could depend on. There was an elite caliber of players -- the guys who led the best teams -- whose ranks I only had the opportunity to play with as a supporting player. And there are professional athletes whose worlds I only view from the outside. But I've come to believe the best athletes have had a moment like mine -- Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team, for example -- when they decide to sink or swim.

Tearful and shameful as it was, it was one of the greatest moments of my life. It was the beginning of my discovery of dedication, discipline, focus, and practice.

Nearly two decades later, in one of the last games I played, in the Masters division for players over thirty five years old, at Northeast Regionals in a tight important game, at halftime, the captain of the team, psyching the team up said we have to play better defense... like Josh. I had gotten us three turnovers on defense that game.

Many ultimate players play for fun, never getting better or pushing themselves to their potential. Everyone has to choose their battles and many just-for-fun ultimate players may choose to excel in other areas. Many people choose the same comfortable route for everything in life, getting their reward from just being on the field, never reaching their potential in anything, never living their passions. I don't know how to meaningfully connect with them.

We've all been demoralized and demotivated by rejection. Have you ever been energized and motivated by one? Has one ever been the driving force behind a major projects in your life?

So-called failures are often the learning opportunities launching the successes of many of the most successful people I've known or heard of. I presume you've found that pattern too.

Rejections can work the same way, motivating you to succeed beyond what they expected you to. In my case, some of the most rewarding parts of my life and greatest achievements were motivated by rejection.

One of the first people Matt and I, Submedia's co-founders, spoke to about the technology was a patent attorney. Neither of us had started a business from scratch, certainly not one requiring millions of dollars of funding, contracts with subway systems across the country and around the world, and so on. We were two guys in our mid-twenties with an idea.

I no longer remember the substance of what the lawyer said about the patentability of the idea or what working with him would be like, but I remember his thoughts on the business side. He said we shouldn't bother with it because it was too big for us and we wouldn't be able to do it. He was trying to demotivate us.

Now starting Submedia, like starting any company, involved risks, challenges, and so on; and we didn't have the skills at the time to handle everything, but people had started other companies and as far as we were concerned if they could do it so could we. Looking back now I'd add that if we couldn't do it but enjoyed the process it would count as success to me.

In any case, I don't think he could have galvanized and motivated us more. I don't think it was to prove him wrong -- as a result of his words, I kept his card to remind me. I've had no interest in telling him of our success. I couldn't believe people operated with such fear and I wanted the world to know you didn't have to be governed by it. Building a company would help share that perspective.

I've had the pleasure of working with some great patent lawyers and Submedia has spent a small fortune on its patent portfolio, but I never spoke to that guy again.