Blog

My grandfather has had long and prestigious history in the closeout industry.  Even into his eighties, he would still go into the office everyday. Before he left after lunch to go play golf, of course.  A piece of advice he once gave was, never fall in love with your own inventory.  Meaning, don’t project your autobiography onto the customer. Even if what you’re selling is the greatest thing that…

My bouts of sadness come and go.  But the good news is, they’re never debilitating, and they’re always seasonal and situational.  And that’s how I know it’s not a mental illness. Because there’s rarely an inability to create a future in my mind. I never get so low that it becomes impossible for me to see anything beyond it. And I always believe in my bones that there is…

The soul is hard to explain to people because it’s just a feeling.  It’s a subjective psychological experience. The intangible essence of a living being. The life force that reaches far beyond the limitations of mortal flesh.  I’m reminded of the doctor who famously attempted to measure the mass of the human soul at the turn of the century, proving that it was, in fact, a tangible entity. Macdougall calculated the total…

What I love about inanimate objects is, they simply go with the flow.  They seek out the shortest and easiest path, the one that positions them so the world does the work for them.  It’s an approach humans could learn from. Because in those daily moments when the universe suddenly stops cooperating with us, when life doesn’t seem to follow the intentions of our inner algorithm, protesting and huffing…

Kaleidoscopes are magical objects.  For five dollars, you can look through a plastic cylinder that contains a few mirrors and a dozen loose, colored objects, and witness beauty right before your eyes.  In fact, the inventor of the kaleidoscope named it that because the word literally means the observation of beautiful forms.  The only limitation, though, is that when you look into a kaleidoscope, you only see what’s inside of…

I used to love waking up at the crack of dawn every morning.  It made me feel heroic and powerful and successful and devoted. Like I was always one step ahead of the rest of the world.  In fact, the only think I loved more than waking up early was bragging to other people about it. They would blink their eyes in amazement at my level of discipline. And…

When we’re willing to be intentional and enthusiastic and sincere and thoughtful and most of all, human, about the work we do, it’s hard for people to turn it down. Or walk away. It’s just so damn unexpected.  I’ve been wearing a nametag twenty four seven for the past seventeen years. And not a day goes by without a complete stranger either asking me why I’m wearing it, or simply…

Everything real comes from initiating something new, following through with all of your might and being willing to risk upsetting people along the way.  When I decided to film a concert documentary underneath a historic tunnel in a popular public park, I was terrified of bothering everyone from the police officers to the parks department to the homeless people living inside the tunnel to the families picnicking outside the tunnel.  I…

Creating a boundary can be as simple as stating what you want.  Which can initially feel like an intimidating task, but once you start speaking up, you quickly learn that the world doesn’t tilt on its axis every take you make your needs known.  More often than not, you simply get want you want and everyone involved is completely pleasant about it.  When I was about twelve years old,…

I recently read a story about an conceptual artist whose latest exhibit was to literally find a needle in a haystack.  The president of the art museum hid a single silver needle in a massive stack of hay. The artist was given twenty four hours to find the needle by hand. And the entire event was broadcast on television.  Sachsalber’s method was simple. He would take a small handful of hay, fold…