There was a recent article in The Washington Post about a very popular social media influencer who does food reviews from his car, as many popular food reviewers do. The writer talked about how that style of filming makes things feel personal because a car is such an intimate space. For me, what’s interesting about […]
Drive, driving, inspiration, thoughts
There was a book on my bookshelf at home, J.D. Salinger’s wonderful book Franny and Zooey, that I probably hadn’t read since college. I decided to read it again, and it’s amazing how my own life experiences have changed—making reading the book feel so different. I’m reminded of the saying, “You can’t step into the […]
book, read a book twice, reading, reread
I was in a restaurant the other day that had a long counter, and it’s possible that people were leaving trash in a spot where there wasn’t a trash can. So, there was a sign that pointed from that first spot to a second spot where the trash can actually was, about 10 or 12 […]
Attention, message, restaurant, sign, signs
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