Everyday most of us battle our own demons.  These Demons often prevent us from doing perhaps the hardest thing there is, that is initiating and adapting to personal change.

With the New Year, I’m sure we’ve all made resolutions.  By now most are long forgotten.   Change is hard. Personal change is even harder.  One wonders how anyone ever does it.  

Perhaps we can do it by a kind of personal mental jujitsu that manipulates the force of our resistance to change, against itself.  This might work a lot better than confronting it with sheer force of will.  And what if we did this in small incremental steps?  It just might be that in that situation, resistance will give way to success.

It is in these “Microresolutions” that Caroline Arnold has found the sweet spot of change.  She details it in Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently. My conversation with Caroline L. Arnold:

SLR cameras, pagers, paper maps, travel agents, home telephones, answering machines, transistor radios;  all quaint reminders of days gone by. Today whole new industries are taking over from the old.  The way we find places to stay when we travel, transportation, even the nature of money itself, is changing.

Back in the 90’s we heard about the “Innovators Dilemma.”  About how cheap products would flood the market, before other manufactures could create products with higher value. Perhaps Sony and other Japanese companies were the penultimate example.

Today, new products enter the marketplace full blown. They are cheaper and more efficient and receive instant acceptance.  How do traditional incumbents defend against this?  They don’t. They either innovate on today’s terms, or they go the way of Blockbuster, or Blackberry or Kodak, or Garmin.

These are just some of the ideas put forth by Larry Downes in his new book, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation..My conversation with Larry Downes:

Someone once wrote that happiness is serious business. But should happiness be a goal in and of itself, or is it simply a construct for achieving what we really desire, and helping us in finding our place in the world? Woody Allen in Annie Hall saw the world divided only into the “horrible,” and the “miserable.”  What kind of a construct is that?

Gretchen Rubin has looked at happiness from all sides now.  She is the author of the NY Times bestseller THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, she is a former law clerk on the Supreme Court and now the author of Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life.

My conversation with Gretchen Rubin:

The reporting of and understanding of sports always seems to be a balancing act between the importance of teams vs. the primacy of an individual player.

Certainly in basketball, the decision was made a long time ago, that individuals stars  would drive the NBA.  Certainly many have over the years.  But as much as any one player, one coach has stood atop the sport.  With eleven championships, Phil Jackson is the master.

But what got him there?  Was it luck, timing, sheer basketball smarts, or a unique ability, almost like a film director in his prime, to manage huge egos and diverse personalities and consistently get the best out of them?

Long time sports journalist Peter Richmond, tries in  Phil Jackson: Lord of the Rings,to pin down who Phil Jackson is and what has made him so successful.

My conversation with Peter Richmond:

A young Johnny, played by Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONES, is asked what he’s rebelling against? He answers  “what have you got?”  Rebellion and the youthful the desire to shapes one's identity, have long been a part of the adolescent experience.  

Today however we know so much more about it.  About what goes on inside the brain that shapes that rebellion and the quest for identity.  What we also understand, but perhaps as parents we don’t always practice, is the the kind of virtuous circle, or feedback loop that results when parents react to adolescent behavior.  What we know is that the behavior isn’t fixed.  That it’s profoundly influenced by action and reaction....in ways that have a lifetime impact.

Few understand this better than UCLA clinical professor of psychiatry and Mindsight Institute Executive Director, Dr. Daniel Siegel.  He's also the author of Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain.

My conversation with Dr. Daniel Siegel:

The recent controversy surrounding Bill Keller’s column about Lisa Adams, and subject of illness and dying in general, brings into bold relief just how personal the subject is.  Dealing with death is little like marriage and fingerprints.  No two are ever alike.

We celebrate and mark weddings and deaths.  But what what are we marking, what we celebrating, really.  These are moments in time, the background and history,  joy and sorrow of which, may have gone on for years before, or may come years after.

Clearly to understand death, we must first understand the fullness life.   In some ways its counter intuitive. It runs counter to our uniquely American notion of being in the moment.  

Few understand all of as well as David Dow.  David is a death penalty appeals lawyer in the State of Texas.  As such, he has dealt with death on a regular basis. He has also dealt with his own personal experiences  which he shares with me in talking about his memoir, Things I've Learned from Dying: A Book About Life. 

My conversation with David Dow:

To live a full life is to make mistakes.  Unlike Fitzgerald’s suggestion of "personality as an unbroken series of successful gestures," for most of us life is messy, complicated and often filled with regret and anger.  When we look back we realize we are,  in some strange and mysterious way, the sum total of all that we have done.  The meals we’ve eaten, the books we’ve read and the people that we have touched and have touched us.  Together it forms kind of life mosaic, unique and often compelling.

Such has been the life of Daniel Manaker. Through the hallowed halls of the New Yorker, where he worked for twenty-six years, to the pinnacle of power in publishing at Random House and Harper Collins, through the death of a mother, a brother and his own battle with cancer, he now shares his unique mosaic with us in his new memoir My Mistake

My conversation with Daniel Menaker:

Back in the dark days of the Cold War, John le Carre published The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.  It cast a light, as only fiction sometimes can, on covert actions that are not a clear choice between good and evil, but one where the methods that western intelligence would use, disturbingly resembled those used by their opponents.  The distance  between us and them became blurred.  It exposed the Cold War not as a battle between light and darkness, but a place where both sides meandered in the twilight of moral ambiguity.

In the days following 9/11 we as a nation, our policies and our intelligence service, the CIA, would again begin to blur those lines.  

At the same time, the actions that the President would arguably take, were reminiscent of Richard Nixon's comments in his famous interview with the late David Frost where he said, talking about Watergate at the time, "if the President does it, it means it's not illegal."

John Rizzo as, CIA General Council was at the center as that post 9/11 storm, as he was at the center of everything the CIA did for 34 years. He takes us through the history in Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA.

My conversation with John Rizzo:

As we continue to debate health care in America, as more people come into the system, the single most significant effort is now to figure out ways to reduce cost. Perhaps the best place to start, is with the one epidemic that accounts for no less than 10% of all health care costs. That epidemic is obesity.

It is our number one public health issue.  Its causes go to the limits of self control and human nature, but most of all to the reality and excess of our current food environment.

Dr. Deborah Cohen, in her book A Big Fat Crisis: The Hidden Forces Behind the Obesity Epidemic — and How We Can End It, argues that public policy, targeted at the food industry, is more important than any kind of personal responsibility.

My conversation with Deborah Cohen:

Richard Pryor would become be the single most influential performer of the second half of the Twentieth Century, and certainly he was the most successful black comedian ever. 

Controversial always and enigmatic throughout  his lifetime, Pryor’s performances opened up a new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn’t just new—it was heretofore unthinkable.

David and Joe Henry have captured the essence of Pryor in their new book  Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

My conversation with Joe and David Henry: