It’s been a long, strange year. I plan to spend from now until January reflecting on 2021, a practice I began in earnest a few years back. What did I accomplish and how does that stack up against my goals twelve months ago? Like always, there will be some big misses, some nice surprises, and [...]

A lot of our emotions look like this over time: Peaks and troughs of confidence, certainty, anxiety, happiness – you name it – that rise and fall with the circumstances we face on a given day. Somewhere this might sound familiar is with our work. One moment, we’re riding the highs of positive feedback from [...]

There is a lot sitting out there in the not-so-distant future. Omicron is resurfacing our COVID anxieties. The Supreme Court is teasing a massive reversal on abortion rights. Markets are acting weird. Many of us have new remote work policies coming that will mark a big change from the last two years. Add to that [...]

If you are more fortunate than others, build a longer table, not a taller fence. The Thanksgiving holiday is wrapping to a close, which for many of us means a return to our own homes, to our regular diets, and to our own routines. Add to that an unusually tough return to the regular work [...]

What would you do if you came across a purple cow? That’s the underlying question in Seth Godin’s early-2000s marketing book, aptly named Purple Cow. Would you tell your friends? Would you rave about what you’d seen? A purple cow stands out from the crowd. I read the book two weeks ago and have not [...]

“A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”Dale Carnegie It’s late on Sunday and I am looking forward to going to sleep and starting off the week on the right foot. I spent all day outside in the city, watching Anne and other friends crush it [...]

At the start of this year I had an idea while out on a run: A website for English students that would help me reach a larger audience than the conversation groups I was hosting each week. I envisioned a variety of different types of content, from short stories and blog posts to interviews with [...]

Back in 2012 I was a reader of the bearish financial blog ZeroHedge. It’s a hard thing to describe if you haven’t read it, so I’ll just use the tagline: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” My sense back then reading it was that the economy was a [...]

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” Winston Churchill I hate being told what to do. I venture to guess most other people do as well. This is just as true for bad advice as it is good. When I start saying mhm and getting fidgety, [...]