I like it when people agree with me. I think most of us do. It’s hard not to enjoy hearing that others think our ideas, attitudes, and beliefs are right. In fact, I’m sure the world would be a much simpler place if everyone just agreed with every single thing I ever did or said. …
A few days before Christmas, I felt rather stressed and frustrated. Hardly a shocking statement, since most of us feel that way at least once during the holidays. My reasons were for feeling stressed and frustrated were not unique – I was trying to finish up shopping, tie up various loose ends with work, figure…
Sometimes when I’m stressed I like to go down into my basement and play the drums. I’ve been playing them since I was 10, and one of the things I’ve always liked about them is that you can hit them as hard as you want. You’re supposed to hit them, in fact – that’s the…
I figured a title like that might pique your interest. Most of us want to figure out how to get what we really want out of life. And don’t worry – I actually do know how to make that happen for you, even if I have no idea what exactly you want out of life. …
Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we expect it to. At least, that’s the phrase we use, which is at least a little dramatic. Life? Like, all of it, the entirety of our existence, just somehow went entirely the opposite direction from what we wanted? That’s probably not the case. What’s actually happening is…
A couple months ago I wrote an article about how to avoid allowing a mistake to challenge your sense of self-worth. This month, though, I realized I left something out of that conversation. It focused on the personal benefit of learning to accept that mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. This month,…
The April 2025 issue of National Geographic featured an awards show of sorts – 33 individuals around the world whose work (at least according to National Geographic) is improving the world in some way. Many of them, as you might imagine, are doing things related to the environment. Several, however, were businesspeople, and two in…
I recently had a conversation with my 8-year-old son about how to deal with failure – and then had an almost identical conversation with a 37-year-old friend about the same thing. It made me realize that, for many of us, our attitude toward failure doesn’t change much as we get older – we don’t like…
Recently my 8-year-old son came home from school and asked me if I knew how many uses for the peanut George Washington Carver had discovered. After silently thanking his teachers for encouraging his love of random information, I admitted that all I knew was that it was a lot. “More than 300,” he told me…
In almost everything we accomplish in life, there are three contributing factors to our success – the work we put into achieving the thing, the intelligence and creativity we apply in pursuit of our goal, and the blind fortune of dumb luck. Most of us spend most of our time thinking about how to improve…