Impressionable young people are picking the worst ideas these days. Go to most college campuses and you’ll find ideologies not far different from socialism on the left and not far different from fascism on the right. This generation is not…
I enjoy being sold to. Weird, right? I think the art of selling is a beautiful thing to watch if it is done well, a pathetic thing to watch if done poorly, and an admirable thing to watch if attempted…
Kodak missed out on digital film. Blockbuster missed out on digital video. IBM missed out on personal computing. Microsoft missed out on the smartphone. Yahoo missed out on Facebook. The music industry missed out on Napster. The list goes on.…
Have you ever gained face with your critics by defending yourself to them? Have you ever gained the respect of people who mock you or question you by telling them they’re wrong about you? It’s tempting to mount a defense when people criticize…
I have a confession to make. Sometimes I go and hang out in my neighborhood’s dog park, and I don’t even have a dog. I get to watch other peoples’ pets run around and enjoy life. I get much of the benefit of…
Earlier this month I received a challenge: take just one part of Jesus’s core teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and actually try to live it. It’s easy to think that Jesus had good and wise things to say.…
Incentives matter in politics, even in the politics of fantasy worlds. Spoilers also matter, and this post if full of them. In Game of Thrones, we see a fantastic portrayal of the ambitions, plotting, and warfare between would-be queens and would-be…
When’s the last time you hosted a dinner party? If you’re a millennial twenty-something, the closest thing you may have is the time your friends came over and ate pizza on your dorm room couch. And if you’re just starting…
What am I proposing? Create a marketing and creative agency which sells and develops its services directly to teenage entrepreneurs trying to get businesses off the ground with limited resources and experience. How does it work? The agency provides packages of…
I visited a local university library for the first time this weekend. It was the first time I’ve been among such a large collection of books in years. The thought of floors and floors (there were seven or eight) of books…
He’s usually an older gentleman, out of place among the young people at the conference you’re attending. He’s wearing some odd combination of suit and Hawaiian shirt. He’s terrible at social cues, but he’s entirely unfazed about that. He was probably a millionaire…
By now I’ve written something over a hundred daily consecutive blog posts. I feel pretty happy with that. That’s part of the danger of what will keep me from writing a hundred more. At any point at which humans have…
When’s the last time you took a wound from words or were struck down by a glance? We all know these things can’t *literally* hurt us in the same way that a wound or a strike can. But, since they…
Let me begin by saying that what follows is not an original or new insight. Obviously. But it’s worth repeating. If you have to ask someone else to validate your judgment about yourself, your judgment about yourself is almost certainly wrong…
Morbid fascination is a strong motivator for me. Recently it’s brought me around to a renewed study of the first world war. For me, the study of this war (and other terrible things in human history) is about far more…
Last night I had to boil my own drinking water. It turns out that water doesn’t come straight from the ground ready to drink. I and hundreds of thousands of other Atlanta residents were outraged to learn this last night. A brief…
Same flares gave light to summer soldiers Hopeless brothers, sons, and friends Lit skulls and sharp wire, countless fields Last sights for shell-shocked, gored young men Same flares give light to rooftop youth Young men on dunes and dancing piers High paper shells scream in July night Through burning hues come hope, not…
Do you like dramatic period pieces? Preferably dealing with geopolitics and the rise of totalitarianism in the early 20th century? With great scenery and swelling film scores? Well, then. We should be friends. And you should also watch The Way Back on…
I’ve become something of a Carly Rae Jepsen fan recently, and I’m not sure how I feel about telling you that. She’s the epitome of bubble-gum pop music (remember the summer hit “Call Me Maybe”?), not a genre I normally hit…
We all screw up. It appears to be a settled law of having goals that we’ll miss them sometimes. Occasionally, though, some people screw up less often than others. Enter reputation ranking. A good reputation is a valuable thing in a tribal/social…
Constellations and cities of stars Shine down on small towns, on ours Shine down on constellations of static men The sparkling worlds above shine on dying stars below Stars, undimmed by our small shoddy brightness Not light from rundown stations, rundown stores, rundown lives No,…
How do you know when you have become an adult? Not an easy question. It’s silly of me to think that I’ve cracked it. But I have a strong intuition about it anyway. Adulthood is a concept that I can’t map to…
I really thought I needed a vacation. I and my teammates have been running a marathon for the past couple of months. It was starting to wear on me. Up until about yesterday I was sure that I needed time away…
“You have the right to remain unpublished. Anything you publish can and will be used against you in a court of internet opinion. You have the right to read the comments. If you cannot read the comments, hate mail will be…
“Dress for success” is common advice for professionals in the interview process. For most young professionals today, dressing up for work is about impressing other people by showing proper respect for social norms. But what if dressing more nicely at work –…
Say exactly what you assume people know you feel about them. A great missed opportunity for strengthening any friendship, any professional relationship, or any family relationship is assuming that people know your good intent toward them. Really sincere written and verbal communication is hard…
There are two ways to write a song about your feelings. In the first, you can tell us what you’re feeling. You can tell us that you’re in love. You can tell us that you’re lonely. You can tell us that you’re…
If you are going to be wrong – and you will be – don’t half-ass it. There are benefits to being wrong boldly. Here are a few. 1. Half-Assed Mistakes Mean Half-Assed Wins There’s nothing inspiring about a hedged bet.…
Dying for values is easy. Millions of young men do it every time we have a war, which seems to be pretty often. Why do generation after generation of young men get suckered in to killing and being killed? Honor.…
We really need to stop labelling ourselves. We don’t get to decide how we’ll be known. We don’t get to create our values merely by choosing to identify ourselves as creators of those values. Reality doesn’t care how we self-identify. Reality…