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Sentences are my spiritual currency.  Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and inhaling and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration. Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower…

How do you know if you’re hanging around the wrong people? Instead of making you feel seen, they make you question your value. And the worst part is, it’s insidious. You wake up one day and realize the world has been dulling and muting your spirit, slowly beating the genius out of you, pushing you to lose a part of yourself that you may never get back. It’s not…

Cold weather, I can handle. With the right combination of warm clothing, clunky waterproof boots and a trusty soundtrack of happy music to keep the blood pressure down and the attitude up, I manage to make it out alive. Cold people, however, I can’t handle. And not on an individual basis. Dealing with the occasional ice queen or an unfriendly colleague isn’t the end of the world. Coldness in…

I have a confusing relationship with talent. As a romantic, when I encounter someone so haunted by talent that I can barely look away from her, a once in a lifetime artist who makes me think, whoa, the world cannot be deprived of this person’s magic, I just want to run up and hug her until every drop of talent comes oozing out of her nose for all the…

In times of misery, our tendency is to try and outrun the pain. To do some emotional jujitsu on ourselves, sidestepping whatever inner conflict bubbles up so we can move on before any of the punches land. On the other hand, it’s also worthwhile to let everything register. To sit with the mental waves as they come crashing in, trusting that we’re at the threshold of something important, and…

I don’t do moderation. Commitment is my sword. And I wield it on a daily basis to slay whatever dragons cross my path. Recently, my clients and readers have been asking me a lot of questions about the relationship between commitment and creativity. And although I’ve already written extensively on topics like stick-to-itiveness and playing for keeps and treating commitment as a technique, there’s still another facet of this…

The element of surprise is an asset. Regardless of what kind of work you do, becoming a master of the unexpected will take you far in life. I’m reminded of my favorite scene in The Devil’s Advocate, when Al Pacino reveals his litigation philosophy to apprentice lawyer, Keanu Reeves: “I’m a surprise, Kevin. The jury, the witnesses, and opposing council, they don’t see me coming. And that’s why I…

Sentences are my spiritual currency.  Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and inhaling and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration. Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower…

You’re not here to be helpful addition. The goal is to get woven into the organization fabric. To be a stand for other people’s greatness. To be a fixture they can build something around. To be a solid foundation with deep roots, from which dozen of other branches can sprout and flourish and seed the rest of the landscape. And if that’s going to happen, you have to bring…

I’m a big believer in selfish creation. Making art for yourself and nobody else. Not the critics, not the masses, not the powers that be, not the mainstream media, not the competition, not the gallery owners, not the distributors and not the cool kids. For you. And in my experience, there are two ways to approach this process. One path is to work from an achievement orientation, focusing on…