Blog

My public speaking mentor once told me that the content of someone’s presentation was irrelevant, because anybody can deliver any given material. What he focused on was the speaker’s humor, because humor is the only universal language. Humor is one of the few things in this life that has the capacity to override people’s native defenses, he instructed. Laughing lubricates people’s intellectual digestive system, the surprise of humor creates…

Homeowners are always renovating with an eye on resale value. Whether it’s a basement remodel, deck addition, roof replacement, kitchen counter upgrade, or installing a multi lane racer waterslide from your bedroom window into your saltwater swimming pool, anything you can do to boost your selling price down the road is a worthwhile investment. Even if it’s frustrating and expensive and not especially gratifying in the moment. During my…

Gallup’s annual poll on employee engagement has collected survey results from nearly forty million people. Here’s one question from their inventory: At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best? This sounds like a dream job, right? Who doesn’t want walk into the office every day and stretch their best muscles? Sadly, not everyone has this luxury. The daily experience of using one’s unique talents…

Gallup has been conducting public opinion polls for the past eighty years. Founded by one of the great market researchers of the last century, their name has become synonymous with relevant, timely, and accurate research on what people around the world think and feel. If you’ve never read their annual happiness and well being index, it’s a fascinating study on human behavior. Their survey questions ask people to think…

Dreams in and of themselves are meaningful, but only to the extent that we know why we have them in the first. That’s the cleanest and truest fuel that drives us to move our story forward. Without it, we’re just postponing our happiness until some imagined moment in the future when everything is just right. Except that time never comes. Just when we get there, there disappears. Think about…

Churchill, the legendary politician and writer, once said that if you have enemies, good, because that mean you’ve stood up for something sometime in your life. Anderson, the great muckraking journalist, said that nothing produces such exhilaration, zest for daily life as a protracted, ugly, vendetta that rages for years and exhausts both sides, often bringing one to ruin. Plutarch, the famous essayist, said that the existence of enemies…

Having been both a member and a leader of various professional associations, masterminds and support groups over the years, there’s one source of tension that always seems to bubble up. The dissimilarity of member commitment. And it’s funny how it plays out. First, we get frustrated and even offended when other people’s priorities aren’t the same as ours. It feels like an affront to our value system. Second, questions…

My friend jokingly calls me the nametag priest, since my sticker is a sort of mini confessional that’s with me all the time. It’s the funniest thing. Not the fact that strangers will just start talking to me, but that they will just start sharing with me. People offer all these intimate, personal details about their lives that were never asked for. Like that one guy on the airport…

Since we can’t change people, the best thing we can do is change how we think about them, and how we think about ourselves in relation to them. Let’s say during a holiday or family trip, one of your relatives starts pushing your buttons. This shouldn’t surprise you, as they are the ones who installed them. But instead of picking another pointless fight or locking yourself in your room…

Age of candidacy is a fascinating concept. It’s the minimum age at which a person can legally qualify to hold certain elected government offices. Every country has their own electoral standards, each with a variance of age levels. France, for example, has a minimum age for president of eighteen years old. Italy requires presidents to be at least fifty years old. The overarching theme, however, is the same. Before…