This post relates my journey of self-discovery as I cleaned out and organized the boxes in the basement of our house.
I’m decluttering my life; going through all the boxes in the basement I’ve been moving around for years. It’s part of an idea I’ve had about simplifying, organizing, streamlining. Maybe I’m just ready to move on and I can finally let go of my comfortable security blanket of possessions.
It started with the boxes and ended with me going to Barnes and Noble and buying five copies of The Night Circus. It’s not something I wanted to do, but I had to.
I should begin by telling you my friend Angie likes to read in book stores. She likes the feel of books in her hands, the smell of ink and paper. Angie likes to do nice things for other people. And Angie likes a pleasant surprise.
Angie’s the kind of person who will take a book off the shelf, turn to the last page and write, “Great book, huh? Love, Angie.” She will do this to random books in a bookstore including books she’s never read and doesn’t intend to read. This is what irritates me about Angie.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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