They don’t work. — Mom always worried about me. She’d say, “Go make friends! Go ask out that girl down the street.” Like any doting mother, she just wanted me to be happy. But I was a happy 9th grader. This was just the beginning of my long-misunderstood life as an introvert. At night…

I’m in a toxic relationship with YouTube. — The French painter, Honoré Daumier, predicted the YouTube thumbnail revolution 200 years early. This is his masterpiece, “The Meeting of 35 Heads” and it looks a heck of a lot like every Vlogger I see:

Some reflections. — This was my old house. It was the smallest in the neighborhood.

You wake up early. — Mom caught me sleepwalking when I was 19. I found out the next morning when I sat down for breakfast. She was smiling and asked, “Do you remember last night?” “Huh?” I said. She said I was standing in the living room, flipping the light switch on and off. She…

The kind you want. — Complexity is a drag. It’s an unnecessary burden you can dodge. We diminish our life with unneeded stress and risks we endure. Here are three easy decisions you can make to better your life. The silly process of risk-taking The news clip made me sit up out of my chair. A woman had jumped into…

Revisiting the beginnings and ends of my childhood. — Imagine you’re running an orphan orangutan facility. One day, the young orangutans are being difficult and bratty. There was a storm the night before and they didn’t sleep well. They are bickering and fighting and howling. Here’s how to fix it. Take a small stick. …

It was the 6th largest military in the world. — Pepsi’s military emerged in the throes of Cold War tensions. Nikita Khrushchev had just taken power after Stalin’s death. He was desperate to quell the escalating nuclearization, spying, and threats between the US and Russia. He also wanted to improve the lives of Russian citizens. Khrushchev took steps to ease…

A massive change of fortune. — Tayeb Souami was a 56-year-old accountant. He was in a grocery store parking lot with his wife. They’d just finished running errands. She said, “The orange juice you bought was too expensive. Please exchange it for the right one.” He’d spent a whopping $5 at the local ShopRite when there…

It’s not that simple. — Years before I walked away from finance to be a writer, I worked at a large and very corporate logistics company. We had a Vice President for every word in the dictionary. There was a VP of Finance, Operations, Process Improvement, and Settlements. We had a VP of Trailers. We…