Blog
Why isn’t this as important to you as it is to me?
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…
The strength of weak ties
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…
Rising like a promise at the back of your throat
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…
Too crude and erroneous to merit an influence
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…
Every day just doing that thing you do
Emerson had this idea that everyone should make their own bible. He said, select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. As someone who has literally written my own bible, I can attest to this exercise’s profound spiritual implications. It was almost like starting my own religion, but without all the goofy hats. But…
The more we feel better, the more sensitive we become to feeling bad
When first introducing a new habit into your routine, a whole host of difficult feelings arise. Soreness, frustration, exhaustion, disgust, guilt, to name a few. But if you push through your initial discomfort, could be weeks, could be months, eventually, the pendulum swings. You reach the point where you not only feel better when you perform that habit, but you feel worse when you don’t. Your brain and body…
There is nothing wrong with us because there is nothing wrong
What’s the right path? How do we avoid picking the wrong one? And if we do, can we switch along the way? We need to stop asking these kinds of questions. Because there’s no such thing is the right path. In the micro, the right decision is the one we make, and in the macro, the right path is the one we take. Besides, which path we take is…
Humanity isn’t perfect, but it’s all we’ve got
My friend is a professional trivia writer and host. Partly because he’s a lover of knowledge, patterns and history, but also because he loves bringing people together to make memories. In fact, the way he builds programs is by reverse engineering fun. Eli starts from the memorable user experience that he wants to create, and works his backwards from there. What types of answers would create strong emotional responses?What…
There is no supposed to be, there is only what is
Most of us are looking at some part of our life and saying, this isn’t where that’s supposed to be. It’s a disheartening moment that comes for us all. Whether it’s our relationship, our career, our health, whatever, nothing cuts us deeper than the aching distance between expectation and reality. But we need to understand, this is not a failure of our life, it’s a failure of our language….
The slower we go, the faster we get there
How long will this take? It will take as long as it takes. Sounds like one of those super unsatisfying aphorisms our parents would say in the car on a long road trip. Not exactly reassuring when you’re ten years old, sitting in the back seat of the station wagon, waiting for something interesting to happen. And yet, this is precisely the speed at which most things occur. No…
