This post examines the line between eccentricity and insanity.
I enjoy talking to crazy people. They’re the only ones who make sense to me. People with big ideas are interesting, but people who are always talking about big ideas and never accomplishing anything are intriguing. These are the ones people give up on. These are the ones relegated to the fringe of society.
My buddy Bill is constantly talking about big projects he’s thinking about doing. I love talking with him, I love hashing through ideas and figuring out problems. It’s like a game, a hobby, a sport in which the ball is constantly in motion but never reaches a goal line. You see, Bill doesn’t actually do much of anything.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post explores the idea of assumptions about perception and comprehension in interpersonal communication.
What would my life be like if I really understood people I talked to? I often catch myself making assumptions about other people’s thoughts and intentions when talking with them. How could I ever possibly know such things? The answer, I know, is that I cannot. But it’s a difficult tendency to overcome.
Oddly, I don’t act this way when confronted with a person who has some obvious deficiency of perception or comprehension. Because the fact they see things differently from me is so obvious, I make an effort to understand their views. For everyone else I assume they see things the same.
Yet how often can we say our mental processes are exactly the same as another’s? I imagine what a plot of comparative abilities would look like, a scale on which each aspect of my peculiar world view were compared with those I come in contact with. I know there would be people on every side of me, both near and far.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is about discovering failure isn’t so bad and about how liberating that knowledge can be.
Fellow blogger Kelly Diels recently talked about how she manages her fears. Here’s how I conquered one of mine.
I grew up with hard-working parents who never had enough money to live on. We were always close to the edge and it wasn’t beneath my folks to find dinner in a dumpster behind the local grocery store.
People cringe when they hear that but really, it sounds worse than it is. Once you get them home and cleaned up, they’re just like all the other expired groceries in the cupboard. And frankly, some of the most fun I had with my dad growing up was finding salvageable stuff in dumpsters.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is about finding happiness in whatever we are involved in and overcoming psychological weakness.
My favorite job was working for a restaurant called Frontier Pies in Provo, Utah. As the name indicates, they were known for their delicious pies and had an extensive bakery to keep the refer stocked with their soul-satisfying goodness. I worked in the bakery as a pie maker.
I was in my early twenties and once again working my way through college, still hacking away at an associate’s degree. To save money I was living out of my car and needing to be at work at five in the morning was a good excuse for being caught sleeping in the parking lot.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is about the perpetually dismal economic condition of the African continent and my assertion that such failure is primarily caused by a lack of leadership in African nations.
I recently overheard my daughters singing along to the popular Shakira song Waka Waka. It’s a fun, rather addictive melody made world-famous by her stunning performance at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Johannesburg. The rest of the day I found myself reflexively humming the chorus “…this time for Africa.”
As I repeated this phrase it got me thinking about the vast and beautifully diverse but still tragically impoverished continent of Africa and whether it may be, as some have suggested, on the cusp of a dramatic period of economic growth. In recent decades we’ve seen explosive growth in other regions of the world such as South America, the Far East and, most recently, in Asia.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is about the financial aspect of fine art and its non-financial effects on mankind.
Americans are passionately, stupefyingly, electrifyingly in love with the rags-to-riches story. It speaks of limitless opportunity, the nobility of the downtrodden and of the inextinguishable hope we harbor for a better tomorrow. We crave these ideas, devour them like ice cream or buttered beets. They represent the apogee of American idealism and are the sine qua non of America’s implicit promise: all your hard work will be rewarded.
Born in 1883, Chester Dale was the son of a Manhattan department store salesman. A contumacious, red-headed boy, he could not be constrained. His father sent him to Peekskill Military Academy for some structure but Chester spent most of his time and all his allowance at the nearby horse track. At the age of fourteen he decided Peekskill wasn’t for him and made his way to New York City where he got a job on Wall Street as a runner.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is about making our lives easier by developing better recommendation engines.
As a young child my grandfather would take me to the dump with him and let me wander through the piles of rubbish while he unloaded our trash. Of course we never brought anything but worthless garbage to the dump but I always found a few useful items in other people’s waste to take home with us.
Sometimes surfing the internet feels like going to the dump with my grandfather again. I climb over piles and piles of garbage looking for the good stuff.
The promise and curse of the internet is an abundance of information. So much information is available it’s not uncommon to hear people referring to this wealth as “information overload.” Most often we’re not overwhelmed by information, we are overwhelmed by sifting through all the junk trying to find what we want.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post explores my fascination with the market economy and the random nature of success.
This is a story of unrequited love, the story of a lopsided romance. It’s about a man who cherished an idea so deeply he could not see the truth, a man so enamored with the love story in his mind he could not perceive reality. It’s a tragedy from one perspective–as all love stories ultimately are–but it’s also a story of rebirth as illusion gives way to reality.
This is my story. And my erstwhile lover…well, you’ll meet her momentarily. She was both my muse and my demon, my inspiration and my condemnation. You see, every once in a while you meet someone so attractive, so alluring and radiant, so surprisingly blunt they consume your thoughts. They make sense of a chaotic world and make you feel good about yourself. They make your chest swell with pride before you even realize you’re doing it.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is about the many different forms art can take and about forgiving ourselves.
My earliest memory is of visiting my great-grandmother. She lived in a trailer on my grandfather’s farm in Cheboygan, Michigan. It sat behind his house where the grass grew waist high until the stalks bent under their own weight. Their dark green length appeared to be bowing in deference to the silver, egg-like throne around which they gathered. Her home was a remnant of a travel trailer she shared with a long-haired white lap dog who had a hard time keeping her hair.
The air inside was stale and pungent, the unventilated accumulation of lost dreams and sorrow. Though it was the middle of the day she was lying in her bed at the rear of her home.
“Come here,” she said. Her voice raspy and quavering.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post examines what we know about motivation from recent studies and my personal experience.
It’s such an emotional rush to walk into a clean kitchen. Well, it is when it’s been cleaned by your child. When you have four children you just get used to your house never being quite as tidy as you would like it to be. And when those children get old enough to make themselves something to eat, you can pretty much plan on not seeing a clean kitchen again for a while. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the kitchen so thoroughly cleaned.
I could feel my muscles relax as though I were getting a Swedish massage while standing there in the doorway. My eyes swept through the room, across the counters, table and stove–all clean. This is how life should be I thought with self-satisfaction, we’ve finally arrived. Could it really be true, all those years of cajoling our kids had finally paid off?
Read the rest of this entry »
