22 February 2023
When I was ten and obsessed with Redwall, I arose an hour early to write a page for my fantasy saga about warring anthropomorphic animals. These “books” never earned readers other than encouraging family members, but I believed they could be big someday if only given time in the limelight. My expectations contained more fantasy […]
8 February 2023
February is the month when New Year’s Resolutions go to die. We might as well cancel that gym membership, pause our Duolingo subscription, and stop buying books. I’m only half-joking. Chances are, we bit off more than we could chew in the new year, and now we’re facing the grim reality of our big eyes […]
26 January 2023
If you’ve seen Rudolph: The Red-Nosed Reindeer, you’ll remember the Island of Misfit Toys. When sitting around a fire on Christmas Eve, the sad little misfit doll said, “I haven’t any dreams left to dream.” This line contains a profound but familiar sadness—giving up on a better future because of continual disappointment. The more we […]
11 January 2023
I have a document called “resolutions.doc,” where I log my new year’s resolutions. I’ve been writing resolutions for so long that the file predates Microsoft’s .docx format, and Word opens it in “compatibility mode.” As I sift through my archive, I see the same resolutions year after year because I repeatedly failed to achieve them. […]
2 December 2022
Everyone has the potential to do great things, and I’d venture half of us have the ambition to realize that potential. But few can manage the pull of ambition. Imagine ambition as a Pegasus, the flying horse from Greek mythology. We’ve attached a chariot to this mighty beast, set it on a path, and now […]
17 September 2022
Should we generalize or specialize? What if there was a sixth Great Lake? Beyond Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario, and Superior imagine you visited the Great Lake of Knowledge. You see waves going on for miles from your place on the beach, and you wonder what dwells along the shoreline or lurks beneath the surface. How […]
1 September 2022
If I wasn’t sweating, I wasn’t working hard. This perspective served me well in entry-level jobs that required physical exertion, like hauling plants around a humid greenhouse. But it didn’t age well. As my career shifted to knowledge work, this “work hard” mindset translated to long hours in the office churning out high volumes of […]
25 August 2022
Remember being a baby? Of course not! But let’s pretend we remember how it felt to drag our little bodies across the floor for the first time. None of us knew we could do it, but we tried anyway, making our blubbery arms hold up our chests in what must have felt like a Herculean […]
14 July 2022
I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. But I’m also not the dullest. I am merely as sharp or dull as the average tool in the shed. Over time, most of us regress to the mean for any measure. That said, our sharpness or dullness is not a fixed state. Like most forces in […]
26 May 2022
Near the beginning of The Matrix, the protagonist receives two pills. Either he can take the Blue Pill to expunge dangerous thoughts and retain his everyday life or take the Red Pill and learn an unsettling but life-changing truth. Many controversial ideas have stolen this Red Pill/Blue Pill concept, and I will shamelessly do the same! […]
28 April 2022
Language constrains our range of expression. It isn’t easy to express a thought or a feeling with words when the language doesn’t have a matching concept. We resort to other forms of expression—paintings, dance, music, stories—to express the things we cannot name. That exploration is beautiful and results in art that can move us. But […]
10 April 2022
I’ve been training for my first marathon for the last few months. I’ve never been much of a distance runner, so my running workouts were always short and exhausting—a few miles at a quick pace. But that’s not sustainable. To ascend to 9-, 12-, or 15-mile runs, I needed a steady (dare I say turtle’s) […]
31 March 2022
Sometimes I think about that scene from Fight Club when Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) holds a gas station attendant at gunpoint and asks him what dream he quit. The sobbing attendant confesses he wanted to be a veterinarian, but it was too hard. Durden allows him to live, and with the fear of death in […]
17 March 2022
I’m always amazed by how quickly a clever framing can sway public opinion. In the US, smoking went from a commonplace activity to a near-villainous crime within a half-century, almost entirely through advertising. Compared to other vices—alcohol, gambling, porn—smoking rarely resulted in violence, financial loss, or broken relationships. But, more than any other vice, smoking […]
1 February 2022
To improve at anything, we must learn. To learn, we must know how we process information. In Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker claims that most people process information as readers or listeners. Readers process information through their eyes, in silence and alone—with books, wikis, or email newsletters. Listeners process information through their ears—via lectures, conversations, or podcasts. While neither method […]
9 January 2022
New Year’s Resolutions are forward-looking—commitments we make (and likely don’t keep) with ourselves to create a future we’d like to inhabit. But if we don’t consider the past, we might set our sights on the wrong destination. Retrospectives are a means to reflect on past performance and garner lessons to apply in the future. One-off […]
18 November 2021
A sad woman in Louisiana loves kittens, as their little meows fill her with joy. So, she adopts a dozen kittens and brings them to her house in the bayou, which is crawling with alligators. These slimy reptiles make her sad and stressed, so the kittens are a welcome relief. But after a few days, […]