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Tell me if this sounds familiar.  You’re working on a train wreck of a project. Or managing the customer from hell. Or giving a presentation to an audience of crickets.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.  There’s no escape. A cold finger of dread hooks around your heart, panic soaks your skin and waves of anxiety start traveling up and down your spine. You’re completely trapped. Frozen…

Marx predicted that power would go to those who owned the means of production.  What he didn’t anticipate, though, was that technology would evolve to a point where the means of production, the instruments of labor, would become simple, free, fast and everywhere.  Thanks to the miracle of digital technology, now anybody can make anything for nothing. Anybody can share anything with anybody for nothing. Creation and distribution have…

Dilbert said that one of the downsides of interacting with other people is that they keep uncovering defects that we never knew we had.  It’s a frustrating and embarrassing and even painful feature of reality.  But then again, isn’t it better than not knowing? Isn’t any person or incident that shows us a truth about ourselves a benefit in the long run?  Besides, our egos blind our eyes to…

Quarter horses are strong, muscular and beautiful.  They excel at sprinting short distances, crushing the competition in races of a quarter mile or less, often reaching speeds of more than fifty miles an hour.  If you’ve ever gone to the tracks before, they’re breathtaking to watch. No wonder they earn tens of millions of dollars for their owners every year. Hell, quarter horses invented the term, right out of the…

People are going to do what they are going to do.  Even under the threat of consequence.  Even if they know full well that it’s bad for them.  Even despite any attempts to control their behaviors and emotions through pleasing, scaring or shaming.  People are going to do what they are going to do.  It sounds quite cynical and fatalistic and bleak. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing….

An addict can be anyone whose life is controlled by something, or someone, other than themselves.  Which means, the fixation doesn’t have to be a physical substance like alcohol or drugs or food or pornography. It’s something much more abstract and mysterious. Something you can’t even see or touch.  And that makes the addiction that much more more insidious.  The example from my own experience is approval. It’s the…

Pew conducted a fascinating research study on the changing religious landscape in this country.  One of the key data points was how the number of religiously unaffiliated adults has increased by nearly twenty million in the past decade.  This growing population has been called nones. As in, none of the above. Resistant to religious classification. Disavowing association with organized faith.  And that’s awesome. Very modern and inclusive.  But the question is, if there’s…

The surreal part about creating art and sharing it with the world is, people have a relationship with your work that has nothing to do with you.  Once your love spills out and they call it art, it now exists in the mind of the audience. It’s all projection. A colorful mirror that reflects back to them exactly what they expect.  People see what they need to see, regardless…

It’s the truest natural law of the universe.  The more we expect, the less we receive.  That’s what happens when we build up a future pleasure in our minds to an unrealistic level.  Whatever the actual event is, it’s bound to be disappointing.  Here’s a helpful quiz to find out just how addicted to expectation you really are.  Do you control situations so that they come out the way…

Asking for help is hard, but accepting it is even harder.  Especially when you’re the rebellious loner free spirit type. The kind of person who insists on doing everything as an expression of their individuality. Someone who reacts independently just to show the world that they won’t be ruled.  That’s me in a nutshell. Growing up, I was never willing to accept ideas for change that weren’t my own….