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.…
Is it the presence of the positive or the absence of negative that makes an experience more enjoyable?
This is the question I asked myself after returning home from a camping weekend with my family and several friends.
The positives were abundant. Beautiful weather allowed for long healthy hikes down gorges and up waterfalls. We walked barefoot on riverbeds and watched the shadows of hawks flicker on canyon walls. Our…
Consider the following:
When we talk about our relationship with work, we often focus on our own satisfaction, work/life balance or lack of meaning in our jobs. In other words we talk about our unhealthy relationship with our own work.…
There are many measures of success but this pearl of wisdom struck me as especially prescient. It was coming from Warren Buffett, who by almost any measure has lived an immensely successful life.
He is one of wealthiest people in the world – yet lives modestly in the same house he purchased in 1958.
He has pledged and has already begun to give away at least half of all his wealth (for those counting that’s $27 billion to date and will probably eclipse over $60 billion.) …
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. …
This is what my five-year-old daughter cheerfully said to me as we biked together on a quiet road on Cape Cod last week.
My initial reaction was to laugh at this comical “out of the mouths of babes” moment. Then I looked ahead of us both and watched my own mother, now well into her 70’s, also on a bike and thought the exact same thing.
Up until that day, I can’t say I had ever seen my mom on a bike. But…
| Growing up, I was told two different versions of who I was and who I could become. My stepfather instilled in me that I would never amount to anything. I was a lazy momma’s boy and she wouldn’t be around to protect me forever. He told me that going to college was a waste of money and time. Fortunately, my mom offered a powerful counter narrative. |
This was a question I couldn’t help ponder after listening to Prince William talk about his mother Princess Diana. Reflecting on his memories from twenty years earlier, he said “I can still feel her love today, I really can.”
This love while most pronounced with her sons was not limited to them. Two other grown men recalled with precision the care and comfort she had provided to them on a visit to their home in Bosnia. Both…
| 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. |
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were the fiercest competitors but always respectful of each other’s talent and drive – whether in victory or defeat. By the end of their playing careers, they had become close friends.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have formed one of the most unique political friendships in our history. The foundation of which was laid, according to Bush, with how Clinton was humble after the 1988 election, “choosing not to lord his victory over Dad.”…
