I will keep this week’s post exceptionally brief, ceding my time to Mr. Rogers.
In the spirit of award season, I ask you to watch his very brief speech accepting his Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award.
In his soft and welcoming voice, he will ask you to something simple.
These 10 seconds will make your day and, if so moved, maybe someone close to you.
Trust me. …
Imagine if the newspaper was only published once every fifty years. What would the major headlines be? What stories would we wake up to read?
According to Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, it would be a positively delightful experience.
We would read about how extreme poverty has been halved, diseases such as polio and malaria almost entirely eradicated. It would tell us that we are living in the most peaceful time in the history of mankind and chronicle the incredible progress made in human rights for women, minorities and the LGBTQ community.…
Last week in Florida another school shooting ended 17 lives and forever damaged hundreds more. In an all too familiar pattern, afterwards people took to social media sharing their sorrow, their prayers, and their outrage.
This pattern is familiar because it has repeated itself all too often. Since Sandy Hook there been over 200 school shootings.
It is often said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.…
In Tom vs. Time, the new docu-series on Facetime Watch, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady gives us a glimpse into his rarified world.
In the second episode, Brady laments, “Every time you say yes, you’re saying no to something else. We only have so much time.”
In his case, this means that when he says yes to football he is saying no to his family.…
Distillation requires us to reduce something to its essence. Within art and literature, it often means that less is more.
Hemingway was especially gifted in this regard and, as legend has it, was once challenged to write a story using only six words. His response?
“For sale; baby shoes. Never worn.”
This six-word format has been popularized by the organization Six Word Memoirs.
It has also been an effective instrument in getting people to open up on issues like race as evidenced by The Race Card Project. …
The phrase goes back to the 1600’s, predating the field of genetics by almost 300 years.
The idea that how we act is literally running through our veins is often seen in expressions of negative emotions like animosity (bad blood), anger (my blood is boiling.), fear (blood run cold), cruel (cold blooded) and vengeful (out for blood).
Beyond colorful idioms, there is more truth to the idea than we may realize.…
With great pride I sat in our local community center the morning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Our eight-year old daughter squirmed on my lap squeezing both of my hands in anticipation. In just moments, she would be called up to accept the MLK Art Contest winner for her elementary school.
She had built a miniature replica of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. …
Last week we took our daughter to see Wicked for her 10th birthday. The show is fantastic on so many levels. It’s the back story of the Wicked Witch of the West, revealing how she became, well “wicked.” Spoiler alert – she’s really not that wicked at all.
Much like the original Wizard of Oz, what we see and have been told isn’t what it appears to be.…
Seven of us crammed into our Ford Flex, driving 45 minutes to see the movie Wonder. We arrived almost an hour early, only to have the cashier inform us they had just two remaining seats. Noticeably bummed, I told the cashier how long we had just driven, asking “Is there anything you could do?” She summoned her manager, who with a push of a few buttons released the tickets for us (apparently many theaters hold seats for fire safety reasons).…
Research shows that anger is the most viral emotion.
We see it online in social media, standing impatiently inline and stuck in confined spaces – like our car driving my family across the state of Pennsylvania yesterday.
One person’s anger spreads to another with surprising speed and efficiency.
It’s hard to break this cycle once it begins. Its effects are corrosive both personally and to the entire community in which it has taken place.…
Early Christmas morning, my brother had just unwrapped a train set he was eager to set up. My sister, just weeks after taking her first steps, was overwhelmed by the spectacle of a giant tree in her house with presents all around.
As my siblings enjoyed these early moments of Christmas morning, I apparently chose this inopportune time to enter this world.
My mother was rushed off to the hospital. …
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.…
Two of the most beloved family movies of all-time focus on a banker named George.
I’ll give you a moment to see if you can guess either or both.
The first, George Banks, works for Fidelity Fiduciary Bank in London. His job is securing investments from customers whose money can help build “railways through Africa, dams across the Nile, fleets of ocean greyhounds, majestic, self-amortizing canals, plantations of ripening tea.” …
In just the last week I tripped over these three tidbits:
On Sunday, our family went to Armonk, NY for Frosty Day. This town was home to Steve Nelson, the lyricist who wrote Frosty the Snowman. There we stood in the Village Square where 65 years ago, Frosty invited the kids to “catch him if you can.’
On Tuesday, I was distracted from work by one of those “20 Things You Didn’t Know About…” click bait articles.…
| This weekend my youngest daughter and I went to see the new movie Coco. The movie is a multi-layered parable about how family connections transcend time. The penultimate scene shows a boy singing a lullaby to his great-grandmother who suffers from dementia. The song, Remember Me, was written by her father and they would sing it together each time he said goodbye to her when she was a little girl. |
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.…
Last week a friend shared a speech given by the late basketball coach Jimmy Valvano.
It wasn’t the “Never Give Up” speech he is most known for – where he literally got off his death bed to accept the ESPN Courage award and announce the formation of the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research.
It was a lesser-known talk given at a sales meeting several years earlier. In…
We like to think that our own beliefs and behavior are based on a rationale examination of the facts available to us.
Conversely, it is common to consider those whose beliefs and behaviors are different from ours irrational.
The reality is that none of us are rationale. Our mind is wired in such a way that we make decisions or judgments and then find the facts and figures to rationalize our position. Not…
We know both empirically and intuitively that the prospect of a reward is a more persuasive motivator than the fear of punishment.
Yet under pressure, our instincts often lead us to threats of the latter.
We see this is our politics, in business, in relationships and with our own children.
Recently, over a lunch comparing parenting notes, a good friend shared an approach that was proving to be successful with his own son. While…
A white man sees a black man walking quickly towards a woman at a bus stop. He senses a threat until he realizes the man’s little daughter at the bus stop is the cause for his rush. He feels ashamed of his bias – especially considering he also has a black daughter.
An African-American police officer is frustrated that he has to under go diversity training. …
This is a question voiced by all who feel forgotten, neglected or marginalized.
It is also the title of the powerful song just released by Pink off her forthcoming album, Beautiful Trauma.
It is no surprise that the lyrics are already being seen as an anthem for any number of disenfranchised groups.
It is the universality of a plea to those in power that so easily resonates. …
It was a simple enough question from a friend I hadn’t talk to in months.
“What did you do this your summer?”
My answer condensed one hundred days into a handful of stories. Each capturing a brief moment in time.
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.…
“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.…
As I walked around my children’s classrooms, the walls were papered with new projects. The collective imagination of each class was surpassed only by the ingenious assignment that inspired it. Poems written by pairs of students describing what they had in common and what made them different, a quilt that showed the individual tastes and interests of each child woven together to make one fabric, an interview series between students discovering the likes and dislikes of a new friend in class.…
