About Our Courses
Imagine a world where they taught piano by lecture, by debating case studies, or by MOOC.
If a piano teacher suggested lecturing on musical theory for a year before you put your hands on the keyboard, or reading about what others learned playing, or watched a MOOC about it, you'd think they were crazy!
You get to Carnegie Hall by practicing. You practice exercises that experienced masters put into a progression from basics so simple anyone can do them to advanced.
Some fields you can learn in the classroom, passively listening, reading about others, debating case studies, and writing papers.
Not leadership, entrepreneurship, sales, or hustling.
No leader, entrepreneur, salesperson, or hustler became great by knowing more facts. Universities teach that way because professors don't know anything else. Most have never led a board meeting, negotiated a deal with the company on the line, or hired or fired someone. They read papers!
No leader became great by learning more theory or facts.
Unlike traditional academic fields, leadership, entrepreneurship, sales, and hustling are active, social, emotional, expressive, and performance-based (ASEEP).
There are many ASEEP fields—acting, sports, dance, musical instruments, and so on. We teach none of them by lecturing theory in the classroom.
We teach them through progressions of exercises based in actual practice, except, leadership and entrepreneurship.
We start piano with scales, tennis with ground strokes, and dance with footwork.
No one created “scales” for leadership. Until now.
Spodek Academy™ created the first integrated, comprehensive progression of exercises to teach leadership, entrepreneurship, sales, and hustling as ASEEP fields.
Joshua Spodek was compelled to create these courses because no ASEEP-style courses exist for these fields. In Marshall Goldsmith's words,
“The problem with most leadership training to me is you go sit in a room, you hear a lecture and then you leave and there's an assumption that somehow your behavior is going to change. Most leadership training is based on the assumption that if people understand they will do. There's a huge gap between understanding and doing. And in life our problem isn't understanding, it's doing. I think most people understand what we want to do, we just don't do it. What I love about what you're doing is it's practice and doing over and over again and you're building a follow-up.
If you just go sit in a classroom and you don't go back and you don't follow up and you don't do any practice, you don't get much better. On the other hand,, if you talk to people, you do follow up, you do practice, you get better. That's why I love what you're doing.”
ASEEP-style training works for ASEEP fields. Traditional academic training doesn't.
Look at any successful ASEEP practitioner. Michael Phelps didn't learn swimming in a classroom. He swam! And he's amazing.
Now consider our traditionally-trained leaders. George W. Bush's Harvard MBA and Yale BA led to a bottom-ten ranked Presidency. For decades, the loser of every Presidential race was the more traditionally academic. Enron's leadership was heavily populated by prestigious degrees.
Meanwhile, Branson, Zuckerberg, Oprah, Musk, Schwarzenegger, Combs, Jobs, Dell, Gates, Jay-Z … many of today's top leaders and entrepreneurs left school.
Spodek Academy™ offers the only ASEEP-style courses in these fields.
We apply tried, true, and tested techniques.
They are engaging, rewarding, and fun.
Most of all they work.
You don't have to take our word for it.
You can read alumni testimonials or
You can read students' reflections to see their progress in their words while taking the courses.
You can also read more about the courses: