We live in challenging times. There are so many opportunities for us to make ourselves sick with worry, so many ways to fill our days, nights, and Facebook feeds with anguish. Some of the worry is vicarious, and some of it is incredibly personal and firsthand. All that anxiety takes a tremendous toll on ourselves,…
I was having dinner the other night with one of my coworkers, and we were discussing a talk I had delivered at a recent conference. During the course of the conversation, I related one of the biggest breakthroughs I had as a speaker that totally changed public speaking for me. In the beginning of my…
In just a few weeks, on October 16, I’ll be helping to kick off the first day of the FutureM Conference here in Boston. My session, ambitiously titled “Where Marketing’s Next Best Ideas Will Come From“, will be more of a workshop than just a straight-up slideshow. We’ll play a little World of Warcraft, we’ll…
It’s August 15, which means it’s National Relaxation Day, a day America imported from our British friends, where it’s called National Slacker Day overseas. There’s much ado about all of the different ways you can choose to relax, which ironically creates stress for the indecisive. In the spirit of the day, I’m going to suggest…
Last night at the Boston Martial Arts Center I had an interesting experience while coaching one of the green belt students on some avoidance techniques. The drill was simple: I swung at the student with a foam-padded bopper and after avoiding a relatively slow swing, they had to hit a padded target. It’s a drill…
Much has been written and much more will be written about the events at the Boston Marathon, and I’ll leave the wordsmithing of it to others who are far better writers. All I have to offer at the moment is some simple advice I received for things like this. Once long ago, I asked one…
Want to know the most frequent piece of advice I’m giving lately? It’s a piece of advice I gave to the staff at a recent internal training. It’s a piece of advice I gave to friends and colleagues who are crumbling under stress. It’s a piece of advice I gave to DJ Waldow and Nick…
Over the weekend, I had the privilege to attend the 15th and final New England Warrior Camp, a previously-annual event held by Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center and one of the finest martial arts training opportunities ever to be held. I’ve managed to attend 14 out of the 15 years and it’s…
I was reading with interest last night about the mayor of Phoenix taking the SNAP challenge, in which he lived on the same budget as any family using SNAP (Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program, or food stamps). The challenge is effectively to live on $4.16 per day of food. His comments on Day 4 of the…
Maki was born in April of 2001, presumably by a breeder trying for a pure Chartreux cat. I got her from the local animal shelter, the victim of a marketing problem – she had a small patch of white fur beneath her chin which made her, for show purposes, a sub-standard member of her breed.…
