My mother passed away in August of 2022, and among the things I received from this amazing woman were many books. My mother had these very beautiful labels that she would put inside her books and wrote her name to indicate they were from her library. A couple of weeks ago, I opened one of […]
In a wonderful James Thurber cartoon from many years ago, there’s a depiction of a man angrily yelling into his telephone, “Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?” It’s a funny take on how we tend to get angry at others when we make a mistake. Here are three […]
cartoon, handle mistakes, james thurber, mistakes
One of my favorite stories about Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, who was inspiring in so many ways, is that he dropped out of high school at age 15 but went back to finish his GED 45 years later at the age of 60. This was a tremendous accomplishment. The reason he did that […]
challenge, GED, high school, wendys
I saw an interview recently with Jerry Seinfeld, where he shared that he wrote the entire Seinfeld series with a Bic pen and yellow legal pads, which he preferred over word processing software. He felt there was something more organic about actually putting pen to paper. In a world where we have more AI tools […]
bic, bic pen, jerry, jerry seinfeld, seinfeld
I saw someone with a t-shirt the other day that said, No Pain, No Pizza—a play on the phrase No Pain, No Gain, which comes from athletics. Essentially, it means that certain things, like gains in muscle, speed, or endurance, come after a period of discomfort during a workout. The wisdom in the supposed-to-be-comical phrase, […]
hard work, pain, pizza, saying, work out
In the wonderful movie It’s Kind of a Funny Story, based on the autobiographical book by Ned Vizzini, the adolescent main character Craig winds up as a patient in an adult wing of a psychiatry unit in a New York City hospital. As he’s being oriented to the unit, a patient walks by and yells, […]
problem solving, think, thinking
One of my favorite concepts is from the world of science and it’s called the signal-to-noise ratio. It is pretty much what it sounds like: the signal is something that we’re trying to get from one point to another, and the noise is anything that interferes with that. In sound, if you wanted to record […]
blog post, noise, sound
I read an article recently about a new trend inspired by those little free libraries you’ve probably seen at the edge of people’s lawns. This new trend is called a “free little art gallery,” where people leave small pieces of art in those boxes. You can either enjoy the art while walking or driving by, […]
art, enjoyment, free art
I was at breakfast with my father one weekday morning at a deli that he regularly went to. When we walked in and sat down, they handed me a menu and then walked away without giving one to my father. I asked him if he wanted to see mine, and he said, “Oh, they started […]
breakfast, deli, father, order
In the wonderful TV series “The Bear,” which is about a family-run restaurant in Chicago, when a staff member wants to indicate they truly understood what another staff member was saying, they respond by saying the word “heard.” There is something profound to me about letting someone know that you truly got the message. In […]
heard, Listening, the bear