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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…

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…

Storytelling isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Narrative is our basic tool for making sense of the world, the currency of human contact, the fundamental instrument of thought and the foundation that psychologically sustains our species. And yet, in the past few years, social scientists keep reporting that human attention span has declined to a mere nine seconds. Really? Tell that to the millions of viewers who watched thirteen…

My grandfather has a knack for making artifacts. When he was a kid growing up in the thirties, he found a poem crumbled up in his father’s roll top desk. The passage talked about how to live a good life, be a person of character, stuff like that. But since the poem had such an impact on his life, he kept it for the next fifteen years. And when…

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…

Game raising is the quiet catchall. Just keep getting better, and everything else will take care of itself. I learned that from a famous comedian. When describing his rise to fame, he attributed his success to constant work at the alter of improvement. What I like about that approach to success is, it has the least amount of glamour and speed––and the most amount of grit and patience. It’s…

Trust is a reciprocal transaction. When we ante up first, people follow suit. When we approach others as already being trustworthy, they prove us right. And when we think the best of people, seeing everyone as good until proven otherwise, our belief encourages them to reveal their better selves. And they usually do. We give what we need. That’s human nature. Our communal caveman wiring makes trust possible. The…

Why do I wear a nametag everyday? Because I’m obsessed with consistency. It’s just how I’m wired. Since I was young, routine and symmetry and structure have been the organizing principles of my life. For me, if repetition and continuity aren’t the answers, I rephrase the question. But like most things in life, our temperament is both an asset and a liability. What we’re good at, we’re bad at….