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“Like swinging a flyswatter at an incoming asteroid.” Every few months, my office shuffles seats. It’s a simple system for enabling collaboration, creativity and connection. The only thing is, it’s totally random. Which means wherever you end up, you end up. And that got me thinking:Futility is a funny thing. We’re such control freaks, and yet, despite our best efforts, most of life’s fickle forces treat us like pawns in their…

“Everybody is a frustrated something.” Not necessarily. It all depends on your relationship with your expectations. For example, I’ve been writing and performing music for twenty years. Composing, playing and singing my own songs is one of the most satisfying and rapturous experiences of my life. But I’m practical enough to treat it as a passion, not a profession. I’m no rock star. I’m completely okay never making money off my…

“It was an itch I’ve been trying to scratch for many years.” Love this story about Nigel Clark, a call center employee who spent seven years working out shortcuts to help customers skip through the dozens of menu options. Proving my theory that anger is the ember of initiative, that only pissed off people change the world, and that once we channel our frustration into something useful, all the bullshit we…

“It’s like quitting cocaine by crazy gluing your nostrils together.” Snap. That was Bill Maher’s take on Chris Christie’s stomach stapling. And my thought is, what’s the problem with crazy glue? For those of us who lack self-control, people for whom abstinence is cheaper than moderation, sometimes the best way to block a punch is to not be there. In my experience, forcing yourself to live in a more black…

“We’ve shattered the myth that demography is destiny.” Last week I watched two documentaries about charter schools, Waiting For Superman and The Lottery. Both movies made me cry. The notion that families are pinning their hopes to a bouncing ball, that kids have to get lucky to get an education, and that destiny is determined by a draw, just breaks my heart. Ugh. Still, after visiting one of these charter schools in…

“You’re tough the way tofu is firm.” This joke from my favorite comic strip hits awfully close to home. Tough is a facade. It’s external. It’s the shell we construct to make sure nobody knows how vulnerable we are. In fact, the word tough means “not easily broken or cut.” And that’s pretty much the polar opposite of me. I take everything personally and cry all the time. So I’m…

“To learn what we couldn’t possibly learn if we were stuck in our own orbit.” What I love most about space exploration is, it’s the prefect metaphor for intellectual curiosity. We may not have uncovered alien civilizations on planet Zoltar, but our country’s space program helped advance the fields of communication, solar energy, videography and mechanical engineering, just to name a few. All because we admitted that our planet wasn’t…

“Everyone could listen and hear what was on their minds.” I love this article about Egyptian dance music. Unlike some countries whose pop music is talentless, forgettable shite, these guys literrally overthrow governments with their songs. So cool. Their music gives people the language they don’t have. It’s not a product to be bought, it’s an object to be socialized around. They’re real artists, who would rather be heard than paid,…

“Sucked into a social tornado.” Spending twelve hours a day online, pretending to be happy, is not art. It’s one thing to use the Internet to help your business, but the Internet should not be your business. During my entrepreneurial days, that was one thing I never understood about my contemporaries. They did everything under the sun to grow their businesses except the one activity that mattered: Actual, physical work. Not…

“Comfort is not a primary agenda item.” Isn’t convenient how our bills show up about two days after our paychecks do? Just when we start getting used to the idea of having extra bones in the bank, life chimes in with yet another expense. It’s almost funny, in a way. Like life is just fucking with us. Then again, that’s how nature operates. Every new beginning is some other beginning’s…