Category: Lessons
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At today’s leadership meeting at Wellsprings, I realized that one of the things I do—and should own—is a general stepping in and out of commitment. I see it as an orbit, an eccentric one at that, that brings me closer and takes me farther from the issues I wrestle with on a daily basis. I…
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The question posed by my journaling app was simple: “Who taught you how to drive?” My dad taught me to drive. What always stuck with me was not what he taught me, but how he handled my first car accident. I was headed to my first job, at the Hazlet movie theater on Rte 35…
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Love is not enough. I was speaking with a colleague in church leadership yesterday in a wide-ranging discussion about where are hearts are these day (one of the reasons I do love my church community). We were speaking about the death of her dog, and what a big impact it had on she and her…
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Noted physicist Stephen Hawking turns 73 on Thursday. He’s lived with something very similar to Lou Gehrig’s Disease for 41 years; the average victim is dead within 14 months. It is a cruel and relentless malady. And yet, here he is, mind still sharp, world famous despite all he’s had to overcome. He’s written a…
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One of the great things about my job is the completely out-of-leftfield meetings we have with international franchisees. Last month, I met two people (a female publisher and male editor) for the Mongolian edition of Men’s Health, which launches early in 2015. I learned a bunch of things—much of it related to the country’s digital…
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It starts with a call. The frogmen in their frogmen suits. One lifts his head from the water to say, “Got something.” You birth him, raise him, praise him, berate him. You place inside him your hope and dreams, And then, one day you awake to find he’s not in his bed after a night…
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I saw Foxcatcher last night and, I have to say, it left me feeling confused and unsatisfied. I remember the events that the film depicts. Heck, I was working for the local city tabloid, the Philadelphia Daily News, at the time and we covered the story in all its tragic, inglorious loopiness, from start to finish…
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I tend to read in my car—audiobooks, that is, though my eyes are getting bad enough that it probably wouldn’t matter a whole lot if I actually read while driving. And I “read” a pretty fair amount, about a book each month. In fact, I consumed exactly 12 in 2014. Here’s what I thought of…
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I want to be a little old man. Concentrated, reduced, Like a sauce my wife cooks up on the kitchen stove. Many things go in, heat is applied, and what is left is less And more. There was a time in life when I was many things— Expansive and full of multitudes. I’m less than…
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My sons have played in a high school rec basketball league for the past 6 years or so, I guess—Pete played 2, Kelly has played 4 now. I coached Pete’s last season and all of Kelly’s. Coaching is a funny term, because there are no plays. The kids really don’t much listen to you. With…
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One of the wonders of the Web is when you find an amazing person. Sometimes it feels as if the person has evaded your attention, as if they lived right under your nose, and you wonder how you missed him or her for all these years. Sometimes there’s just the arrival of something that makes you…
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We recently pulled together a bunch of mini-essays about port-a-potties, of all things. I had fun writing the intro (following): I’m not sure how we did it. Somehow humanity built things for 10,000 years before George Harding received a patent for a plastic portable restroom in the 1960s—which ruins my vision of the Egyptians building the pyramids…
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