“You will not have influence until you accept responsibility. Not fault, but responsibility.”

— Jon Tyson

A few weeks ago, I was working an event with a colleague of mine. Somewhere in the chaos of registration tables and name tags, she overheard one of the attendees mention, almost as an aside, that she had bought a tick…

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“Ninety-four percent of Swedish drivers think their driving skills are above average. Eighty-four percent of French men rate their lovemaking abilities in the top half of French lovers. Statistically, that’s impossible. But psychologically, it’s all of us.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

A few weeks ago, I sat across…

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“The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.”

Jacob M. Appel

My wife walked down the hall to start getting ready for bed, and I did what I always do i…

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“A master chief, the senior enlisted rank in the Navy—who was like a god to us—told us he was giving us an invaluable piece of advice that he’d learned from another master chief during the Vietnam War. He said, ‘This is the best thing you’re ever going to learn in SEAL training.’ […] This is all he said: ‘Calm is contagious.’”

Rorke Denver, Former Navy S…

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One of the biggest mistakes we're making today is trying to have thick conversations in thin places.

"Thick" conversations—ones that require nuance, context, and shared humanity—are the kind we were made for. These are the talks you have on porches, over dinner tables, or walking side by side with an old friend. They are complex, layered, often without c…

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I’ll tell you the moment I decided to delete Instagram off my phone. It happened one day when I noticed I was laughing at the same meme for the second time. I was swiping through stories, laughing my way through disappeared time when I was struck by a sense of familiarity. “I’ve seen this video before,” I thought. The emotion that followed took me a whi…

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Happy New Year!

If you’ve been following me for some time you know that… it’s been a while. It’s not that I’ve stopped writing, but that my writing has been focused elsewhere. Every time I thought about you here, and the goals I had set for 2024 for the number of times I was going to publish, I felt ashamed. Like I had let you down, even though it was my…

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When I am asked to hit the road and keynote an event, most of the time, I don’t choose my destination or my audience. This means that, from time to time, I find myself in some very unexpected situations.

There was the time I arrived for an event only to find out it was actually an under-the-radar fundraiser for a polit…

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Recently, I’ve become a connoisseur of sensational headlines.

You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones your friends and family share on Facebook and X, with a short smirk-of-a-comment designed to provoke those they disagree with or virtue signal to their socio-political peers. Of course, when you actually click to read the article it’s never quite w…

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A friend of mine sent me a quote from a spiritual teacher named Andrew Cohen. I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with him about much. But this quote is profound:

In the end, as I see it, there are only two possibilities for a human life. Either you strive to move beyond where you already are or else you continue to do what you have…

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