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Thank The Forgotten

This Thursday most of us in America will find ourselves surrounded by family and friends celebrating Thanksgiving.

Perhaps during prayer or a quiet moment in our mind, we will offer silent thanks for those whose presence in our life has made us who we are.  Our parents, partners, children, family or close friends will top most lists. 

Hopefully more than a few will go the extra steps and give voice to those silent thoughts in ways that go beyond a cursory thanks but offer a level of specificity of why we are so grateful for their presence in our lives.…


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The Hidden Costs in Your Shopping Cart

It’s hard to argue with the convenience shopping carts have added to our shopping experience. But upon further inspection this seemingly innocuous invention may be both a cause and symptom of some of society’s gravest ills.

In 1937, Sylvan Goldman the owner of Humpty Dumpty grocery stores in Oklahoma created the first shopping cart by attaching wheels and two shopping baskets to a chair. His goal wasn’t shopper convenience but a desire for people to be able to carry more groceries around and out of his stores.…


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Help!

John Lennon once referred to Help! as one of only two true songs he ever wrote with the Beatles (the other being Strawberry Fields). In contrast, so many of his other songs felt “phony” to him.
 
Both the lyrics and the backstory behind this Beatles’ hit contain many truths about the nature of help, and how hard it is to both give it and ask for it.…


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Why I Can’t Stand To See You Suffer

Several weeks ago, I was leaving Grand Central Terminal.  As I was going up a very long staircase, a young Asian woman was descending in the opposite direction on the escalator. Talking on her cell phone, I noticed a single tear slowly trickling down her cheek.

My initial inclination was to turn around and walk down the 40 steps or so to ask her if she was ok – her pain was that palpable. Thinking…


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Are You a Taker or a Giver?

A recent study observed groups of people in public settings.  They recorded that every ninety seconds someone does something for someone else. Hold a door.  Pass the salt.  Fulfill a random request. 

Interestingly, only one in every six instances included someone saying thank you. 

Some would say this is a classic example of some people who are selfish or ungrateful. While others are by nature are more selfless and altruistic.…


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What Does It Take to Save a Life?

This week buried beneath the din of politics and conflict was a brief article in the New York Times featuring an 81-year-old Australian man who was donating blood for the last time in his life.

He started giving blood as a young man – a way of paying back those who had donated the blood he needed to survive surgery as a 14-year-old boy.

He would go on to give blood every few weeks for over 60 years.…


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Old Friends

I have been blessed in many ways. One of which has been the presence of wonderful friendships throughout my life. Over the course of the last month, I’ve had three separate occasions when I’ve been able to spend hours talking to three of my oldest friends.  People who have literally known me most of my life.

Each of these conversations was a reminder of how valuable our oldest friends are for our past, present and future selves.…


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How Much Do I Have To Give?

The school lost everything. An after hours fire melted crayons, turned paper to ash and pencils to tinder. The supplies had just been donated as part of a foreign aid trip to this Nigerian classroom and now needed to be replaced
 
When our daughter brought the note home from her teacher requesting any used supplies, it included an unnecessary apology for adding one more request on top of the flood that come in for donated coats, toys and food to mark the holiday season.…


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Thank You

As Thanksgiving approaches, I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude for all of your support and interest in these weekly notes.

Thank you for taking a few minutes each Monday morning to read these emails.

Thank you for your emails to me filled with kind words and your own personal stories.

Thank you for forwarding these words to your friends and colleagues.

Thank you for posting them on social media.…


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Can You See Both Sides?

A player takes a knee and is labeled unpatriotic.  A fan burns his team’s jersey in protest and is called a racist. People, who had previously been united by a team, are now divided over an issue.
 
It is an indictment of our times, our media and our educational institutions that these two sides are pitted against one another, seemingly incapable of seeing, yet alone understanding the point of view of the other.…


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Don’t Follow This Recipe

“It begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”

There is a lot to unpack from this statement in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary, The Vietnam War.  

While it was written to summarize the origins of one of the most divisive periods in our country’s history, it could just as easily be applied to other past and future conflicts.…


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Grab A Bucket

The fire broke out in the early morning. It traveled quickly through the walls of the white house on the corner lot. The 69 year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson rushed out of his home calling for help.

Townspeople throughout Concord came running to his aid. They included Louisa May Alcott, who with her sisters,  were armed with baskets to rescue the books in his library.

On a recent tour, one of the historians pointed out a common feature of his home and others at the time. …


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Why Do Racehorses Wear Blinders?

This is the question posed by legendary music producer Jimmy Iovine during the spectacular HBO docu-series, The Defiant Ones, chronicling the parallel journeys of his life and Dr. Dre’s and how together they made music history.
 
His answer to this question is “focus”.  Without blinders horses would look to their left and right distracting them from their pursuit of victory.
 
This six hours series is a testament to how focus and hard work can help overcome extraordinary life challenges.
…
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What To Remember This Memorial Day

In 1943, off the coast of North Africa, my grandfather, Burton Poucher was one of 1,149 U.S. soldiers who were killed aboard the HMT Rohna.

The ship was sunk by a newly designed remote control German glider bomb – a precursor to today’s “smart” missiles. It was the largest single loss of life in the sea during the war.


Prior to shipping off, Burton was stationed in Indiana for training.…


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80% Of People Will Find Jobs This Way

Over the next two months, approximately 3 million young adults will graduate and enter the job market.  About half will graduate from college and the other half will graduate from high school with no plans for higher education.

Despite the differences in career paths and future opportunities, how they find that next job is likely to be similar. According to this study, 80% of people will find a job through someone they know.…


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Making Time For Old Friends

I have been fortunate in my life to amass quite the motley crew of old friends. They have shaped and changed me in ways it is hard to capture. I suspect I am not alone. Studies have shown that our friends affect everything from the choices we make to the financial risks we take and from the weight we gain to how long we live.

By sheer numbers alone, from middle school through the time we have children, we are constantly under the influence of our friends. Spending…


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Who Would You Thank In Your Oscar Speech?

Imagine you are giving an acceptance speech for a major award, like the Oscars. Who would you thank? God? Your Mom? Your agent? Would the press write articles about how your hard work allowed you to overcome some struggle in your life to reach this pinnacle?

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. It is a familiar script on how we tell our stories about becoming successful (hard work) and who, if anyone, we have to thank for it (the usual suspects).…


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Can You Connect The Dots?

The factors that contribute to our success work in concert, not isolation.

Our health impacts our ability to learn. Our ability to learn impacts our health. A single traumatic event from our childhood can have lifelong consequences.

When we don’t connect the dots, we draw incomplete pictures that make little sense. This fosters multiple bureaucratic systems working in silos and frustrating systems that add to core problems instead of solving them.…


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Does “Who You Know” Ever Impact “How You’re Doing”?

While we may feel like we are “masters of our own universe,” most of us have a galaxy of friends and connections that impact our lives in a variety of ways. We call them our social networks.

There is the obvious way. We reach out to those we know for help. We have a legal question, so we ask a friend who is a lawyer. Our car has an issue, so we reach out to someone with mechanical experience.…


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Undercover Awesome

That was the term used to describe Commissioner Scott Semple of the Connecticut Department of Corrections as he was introduced to a gathering at the Vera Institute of Justice.

In discussing his work to create a healthier and more humane corrections system, Mr. Semple lamented that people who work in corrections seldom get to see the success of their work.

After all, success is when someone doesn’t come back to prison — and goes on to live a happy life as a productive member of the community.…


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