Recently a friend of mine treated himself and his wife to a new mattress, which is the most boring way to begin an article that I can think of. Dinner? No. A romantic vacation? No. How about shopping for a way to more comfortably be unconscious? Woo-hoo! Oh, and by the way, I’m not saying…
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This morning I made the mistake that almost all of us make in our first hour of consciousness – I checked my Facebook account and scanned the headlines. Consequently I learned the following: a friend of mine is leaving today for a two-month vacation to Singapore; the United States has a list of 59 terror…
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My wife and I got into an argument this weekend about how we should be spending time with our son. Sounds like fun, right? That sentence might have conjured up images of wild shouting, doors slamming, and the hours of frosty silence that often follow heated arguments. And with good reason, since all of that…
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For the past eight years, I have delivered a leadership presentation called Unleash Your Inner Tyrant! at conferences across 48 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and six Latin American countries. In that presentation, I pretend to encourage my audience to engage in all kinds of terrible leadership practices – outsourcing blame, avoiding contact with employees, making…
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In the last 24 hours, I’ve received something like 462 emails. Mercifully, Gmail dumps most of those into a ‘promotions’ folder, which may as well be a trash folder for all the attention I pay to it. It’s filled with coupons for things I don’t want, solicitations from companies that have apparently purchased my contact…
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Hey everybody! I don’t mean to toot my own horn or anything, but you are looking at the newest board member for the Affordable Housing Authority in my county. And yes I’m aware that you’re not actually looking at me right now, and yes it’s true that didn’t exactly have to beat out 55 other…
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We are bombarded with choices. Right now I’m sitting at a hotel bar in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I’ve got somewhere between 60 and 70 beers I can choose from. That’s just the taps, by the way – I’m not even bothering to look at what they have in bottles. Most of my choices are some…
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My wife can’t handle the grocery store. She’s an incredibly intelligent and accomplished person – got her Ph.D in organic chemistry, so you know that I married up – but she goes to pieces whenever I make the mistake of letting her come grocery shopping with me. She looks at everything, goes down every aisle…
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I’ve done some preliminary market research, and I’ve learned that the Internet is really popular these days. Have you tried it? Of course you have, unless you live in a re-purposed beaver dam and make all your own clothing out of walrus pelts and alpaca hair. In fact, you couldn’t even be reading this without…
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Ah, the Internet. It’s one of the greatest inventions in the history of humanity. We can do things today that our ancestors never even thought to dream of. If they could come back and see what we’ve built, they’d think we were gods. Which is why tons of people love using the Internet to complain…
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