Written by Tom Junod, it relates Obama's first year in office to the parenting movement/book series Positive Discipline. From the PD website, the first two concepts (among others) of Positive Disciple are "Mutual respect" and "Identifying the belief behind the behavior".
This in mind, the main point that Junod makes is that Obama's style of governing is both the same measured and thought-out approach that he showed while campaigning and is very much in line with the principles of Positive Discipline. As defined by myself, these include "take the time to teach", "understand the viewpoint of others" and "don't act impulsively".
While it's true that more aggressive techniques of parenting or governing may get more immediately tangible results, the long haul outcome should (hopefully) be all the better for this long term approach.
Intriguing stuff.
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Also from this Jan 2010 issue of Esquire was the short piece "How to Start a Small Business" by Ken Kurson. Truthfully there wasn't a huge amount of instruction (as one of the three directives was to purchase QuickBooks), but the article certainly made appealing the idea of owning at least a piece of a small business.
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Finally, it wasn't from this particular issue, but given that these are all Esquire works, I wanted to link to "Garret Dillahunt: The Man Who Disappears" by MFLW (my favorite living writer) Chris Jones. I've posted on lots of his stuff here (with his story "The Things That Carried Him" being my favorite) and I suppose just as Jones writes of a sort of man-crush on Dillahunt's movie and TV work, I have the same thing for his writing. Very very short piece and interesting.
