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Sentences are my spiritual currency.  Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading 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 of things…

You can’t cure loneliness with warm bodies. Only the right bodies. Joining a club or becoming part of a group or getting hired at a new company quickly buys you a baseline of belonging, but if you start to discover the organization is filled with people whose mental, physical and moral temperament is incompatible with your own, after a while, the loneliness starts to creep back in. And the…

We don’t care if you know everything. We care if you can participate in deep, thoughtful conversations about anything. That’s a completely different skill. Aninfinite game, if you will. In which you’re not playing to win, but playing to keep the game going. Where it’s less about intellectual firepower and more about curiosity and vulnerability and enthusiasm and patience and maybe even a little bit ofwow I never thought…

You can’t teach thoughtfulness. What you can do is create a system that makes thoughtfulness easier, reminds people to keep practicing it and rewards them for doing so consistently. Kahnoodle is an app that gives you points every time you do something thoughtful for your lover, like bringing home flowers, writing a sweet note or doing the dishes. You can even cash your points in for discounts at popular…

Insight isn’t as mysterious we make it out to be. The nature and origin of insightful thinking, the cognitive neuroscience that drives the insight process, not to mention the history of how artists successfully used insight to fuel innovation, are all widely documented. But here’s the part of the process we miss. Developing insight is only half the work. Delivering it is the other half. And if our job…

I used to be a board member of a small mastermind group of artists, freelancers, performers and entrepreneurs. Once a quarter, we gathered for a weekend retreat. The agenda was to give updates, share news, disclose struggles, offer feedback, solve problems and of course, make tons of inappropriate jokes. And I was always blown away at the quality of people’s insights. During our meetings, tears were shed, gasps were…

Sentences are my spiritual currency.  Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading 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 of things…

I spent most of my childhood summers at sleep away camp. And looking back at all my years of canoeing and hiking and collecting wood and making fires and eating foil packs of undercooked ground beef, I remember the biggest life lesson that stuck with me: Always leave the campsite better than you found it. Ask any counselor in the world. It’s the number one rule of camping. But…

We use the words instinct and intuition interchangeably. And while they do exist on the same spectrum, there’s still a crucial difference between the two ideas. Instinct comes from the word instinctus, or, “impulse,” meaning it’s a biological tendency. It’s the transient reaction that happens in our bodies, apropos of right now. Intuition comes from the word intuitio, or, “consideration,” meaning it’s an accumulated belief. It’s the ongoing collection of experiences, apropos of…

Work fascinates me. Every time I come into contact with that particular word, it touches a sacred part of me. It’s interesting, there’s this fundamental part of who I am as a person that perks up at the idea. Like a hound tracking a scent. Work is my bacon. The best part is, once I realized that work was more than a job, once I expanded my definition of…