Last weekend my wife and I took our 20-month-old son to a pumpkin farm. We did this because the weather was perfect and because we live in the Midwest. Finding a pumpkin farm or apple orchard in the fall is about as Midwestern as eating an elephant ear at the county fair. This particular farm…
Recently a friend of mine – and by that I mean ‘way too many people I know, but this article will flow better if I pretend I’m talking about a single person’ – told me that he’s miserable in his job. He’s working far too many hours with no relief in sight, sees no opportunity…
Time for some levity! If you’re looking for a serious, career-building article, we’ve got one of those for you. But if you’d like a little goofiness, then you’ve come to the right place! So my wife’s birthday was a couple weeks ago. She turned 33, which you’re probably thinking is pronounced ‘thirty-three’ but in our…
Recently my wife and I got into an argument about something. It’s the same something we have occasionally argued about for just about as long as we have been together, and it ended the same way it always does – both of us frustrated, no progress made. It’s as though we periodically say, “Things are…
My brother takes forever to make a decision. Not always, of course; it’s not like he stays naked until 3pm because he can’t decide what to wear. But he did once take two years to buy a couch. That’s not an exaggeration. From the time he decided he needed a new couch to the time…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…