Last week, after appearing on CBS Sunday Morning, Three Little Engines became the top selling book on all of Amazon. It is crazy to see your book ahead of the likes of Stephen King. A week later, I received word from my publisher that the book had made the New York Times best seller list. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t overwhelmed and thrilled by both results.…
Two teams compete in the Olympics.
Both win the Bronze.
One country is elated and the other disappointed.
So goes the power and toxicity of expectations.
When considering the word expectations, it’s almost impossible to imagine it without some qualifier.
High, low, exceeding, diminished, raised, wildest, lowered, defying, beating, surpassing, failing, great, outsized, living up to, playing down and on and on.
So unhealthy is our relationship with this word that when we say that something has “met our expectations,” we shrug our shoulders, suggesting some level of mild disappointment.…
This Sunday was quite the eventful day for me for multiple reasons.
A CBS Sunday Morning segment featuring the story behind my new children’s book, Three Little Engines was scheduled to air. The excitement was palpable for several reasons. The idea of having my book and its message shared with an audience of millions is obviously pretty cool. Selfishly, the idea that my mom, my family and friends would be able to gather around the TV to see me talk – not just about the book – but about how grateful I was for all they had done to get me “over the mountain” was a tremendous gift.…
We knew this moment would come.
Throughout the pandemic, our family has been watching Little House on the Prairie. It has in many ways been a cathartic experience, watching the Ingalls family with all of its struggles persevere through no shortage of difficult times.
While the book has been subject to recent criticisms, the television series from my youth has held up remarkably well – tackling issues of poverty, race, Native American relations with nuance and compassion largely unseen today. There…
A few random times each day, my Apple watch will beep with a nudge for me to breathe. Presumably this isn’t because I’ve stopped doing so, but rather a reminder to take good deep breaths for up to a minute.
On average, we take 20,000 breaths a day. A vital and subconscious act that we take for granted. Think about it. How many of your own breaths do you even notice each day?…
We love to think that we are the primary engine of our own success. And there is no doubt that our individual effort is critical in almost any achievement.
But as my new children’s book, Three Little Engines – a modern retelling of the classic The Little Engine that Could that comes out on Tuesday – I wanted to use this opportunity to illustrate who really helped this book ‘get over the mountain.”…
As Independence Day approached, I decided to google the root word “depends.” The origin of “depends” goes back to the Latin terms “de” meaning down and “pendere” meaning “hang.” Hence the dual and often conflicting definition of both “needing or requiring support” (e.g. “I depend on you”) and “undecided or open to influence” (e.g.“It depends”)
Many Americans have a strong aversion to the idea of dependency or even its softer cousin, “interdependency.” …
Consider this scenario. One daughter goes to the pool and her mom buys her some candy. Another daughter goes into town with her friends and uses her allowance money to buy some candy. A third daughter gets no candy that day.
Is this fair?
This was exactly the debate that unfolded in my household last week.
One one level, you could look at this one particular situation and conclude that it isn’t fair. …
Over the last several months, I’ve been on a good run.
It started with being asked to give the commencement address at my alma mater.
Then on Friday, I published my first piece for Esquire. I’ve always wanted to write for them and this specific topic, “Dads without Dads” is an especially personal reflection timed for Father’s Day.
There is an NPR special report I’m working on examining inequality in education on Long Island that will air at the end of the month.…
If you see the movie version of “In the Heights” based on the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, you are likely to be wowed by the lavish dance numbers, moved by the stories of dreams and swept up by the fantastic music. Yet for me it was the poignancy of a collection of artifacts that show up in the film’s penultimate scene that will linger long after the images and tunes leave my head.…
It seems as if every other person I know got a dog during the pandemic. A testament to the many perceived positive attributes of man’s best friend.
While we welcomed our dog, Scout, into our family four years ago, I can attest to how much their love can do for a family during the most difficult of times.
Whether in a human home or within their own families or packs, dogs by and large are loyal, cooperative and caring.…
I created a bucket list before they were fashionable – or even called a bucket list. I was twenty-five at the time, filled with hubris, and created a list of 51 things I wanted to do before I died.
Looking back at the list, I’m not doing too bad. I’ve married, become a father, written a few books, taken my mother to Disney World, visited Paris and walked on the field at Fenway Park. …
Last week, I finished Broken Horses, Brandi Carlile’s new memoir. While reading it, I struggled to understand the reasoning behind the title.
Literally it is a reference to the horses Carlile has had throughout her life. They are broken in the sense that they are insufficient in the qualities we typically value in a horse.
Upon further reflection, the entire book seems as if it is a triumph of broken-ness. While…
I am now officially fully vaccinated. With the new CDC recommendations, it would seem as if I’m able to go back to doing many of the things that have been long denied.
While personally, I’m happy to shed masks when appropriate, eat indoors, gather with friends, I don’t feel any sense of extreme joy or even relief. I imagine this is in part because my children, other family members and over 40% of our country are still not vaccinated. Some…
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” This lyric from the final song in Hamilton, captures not only an important question about our history but also about our present.
There are different versions of our histories – within our families, our institutions, our country and our world.
In many ways, it is less important to reconcile our complicated personal and national histories than it is to at least spend some time examining them.…
We often romanticize the idea of struggling. We believe that some struggle on the way to achieving any desired outcome is somehow noble or part of how our character is forged.
But to see anyone, especially a loved one, truly struggle, is heart wrenching. When I say truly struggle, I mean in the strict definition of the word, “to make strenuous or violent efforts in the face of difficulties or opposition.” …
I write this at the end of an especially frustrating day at the end of an especially frustrating week. The sources of my frustrations are irrelevant. By its very definition, frustration is less about the outside world and more about our perception of it. As this article from Psychology Today points out, “The majority of anger and frustration in life, no matter what the situation, has at its basis one simple thought: It shouldn’t be this way.…
Several months ago, I was listening to Marc Maron interview Glenn Close for his podcast. It was fascinating on many levels — for example, who knew that the actress was raised in a religious cult?
One story, in particular, has stuck with me. As a young address, Close was an understudy looking to make her Broadway debut. One particular Saturday, the director, Hal Prince, told her that he was thinking of letting the leading lady go and was going to make his decision after the matinee. …
When I was young, I would often wait until the precise moment when my sister had a mouthful of cereal before unleashing something silly or ridiculous. My only goal was to create sufficient laughter to cause the milk in her mouth to shoot out of her nose. I was remarkably successful.
Growing up, I would often take any proverbial stage in an effort to make others laugh. …
When was the last time you said to yourself, “I never thought about it like that”?
This sentiment reflects our ability to reconsider existing beliefs or opinions. If it’s been a while since you uttered that phrase it may be time for you to think again. A good starting point would be reading the book with that exact title: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant.…
These are hard.
What would you take for yourself, that you know would help someone else more?
What would you give your child, that if you gave to another child instead would dramatically change their life?
These philosophical questions are ones that we don’t explicitly ask ourselves. They are by design difficult to answer. They pit our egalitarian principles and a belief in a fair world against our most basic desire to provide and protect ourselves and those we love. …
I recently finished reading the Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain. It was an especially difficult read as it conjured up memories from my own childhood that I don’t often like to revisit. A time when my mother’s struggles dominated our life.
If there was a silver lining in this brilliant but bleak book, it was to serve as a reminder of the absolutely pivotal role my brother has played in my life.…
What makes for a successful day? If you’re like me, you might take a look at your calendar, figure out in your mind what you have to get done, and what you’d like to get done. Depending on how many things you tick off your mental list, you’ll do some calculation and determine whether that day was successful or not.
On Friday, my day was destined to be tight, small windows existed in between various obligations that included bringing my children to and from school and most importantly taking my wife to a minor medical procedure an hour away and waiting until it was completed so I could escort her back home. …
I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately.
On Monday of last week, an essay series that I worked on with Fast Company and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched with this piece from Saru Jayaraman looking at the future of work for restaurant workers. In it, she asks us to imagine a future where “diners don’t just ask about where produce comes from but how well workers are paid.”…
In conjunction with Women’s History Month, my 11 year old daughter came home from school with an assignment to write a paper about a female member of her family that was no longer with us.
She chose her great grandmother, whom she never had the chance to meet but shares a middle name.
As part of this assignment she had to interview at least two members of our family who knew Nana using a series of questions supplied by her teacher.…
