I just ran for Congress, was on reality TV, was once a brand manager, and have worked at various startups. I'm still figuring out what's next...
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While the broader economy struggles, Silicon Valley sits apart. Things are red-hot. With Facebook’s impending IPO, the crop from 2011, and the current venture climate: money is rampantly in the air. Lots of talk of buying condos, building homes, new cars, and awesome global trips are everywhere. It’s been interesting to see how people treat [...]
I’ve long thought about what changes. As I get older, how I change. My tastes. How I make decisions. How I interact with the world. What I value. How I spend my time. What I worry about. What makes me happy. All that stuff. Recently I’ve found that my random thoughts on this have sort [...]
Over the past year, whether I was in New York, Chicago, San Francisco or Cincinnati, there was always one unmistakable sight. White earbuds. Walking in the morning across Madison Ave, getting on the El headed downtown, or out for a run along the Ohio river. White earbuds dangling. I was heading in to the office. [...]
The big news of the week was that of Steve Jobs retirement from Apple. His impact went beyond a brilliant technologist or businessman. Beyond painfully beautiful consumer products. He is a cultural icon. As I saw the profound impact his announcement had on so many of the people I knew, I was trying to put [...]
I’m gathering up some of the more interesting articles I’ve found across the web over the past month. I’m not actually sure if it adds up to 2 hours of reading, but it sounded good to me. Why pain? Because reading some of these made my blood boil and my a indignation rage. After avoiding [...]
Duty. In Mullaley’s thoughts on the Ramayana, he focuses on the notion of duty. Growing up with parents who are apart from the culture you find yourself in presents all kinds of interesting and unique experiences. One of them was being surrounded by the notion of duty to family. When I was reading about duty, [...]
In The Unforgiving Minute, Craig Mullaney talks about his Rhodes Scholar experience a bit. In introducing it, he speaks of one of the criteria for selection being ‘a demonstrated passion for “fighting the world’s fight.”‘ I was immediately struck when I saw this phrase. What did it mean to fight the world’s fight? How do [...]
I read Joker One and The Unforgiving Minute back-to-back (thanks, Amazon recommendations). I expected both books to be very similar given they are about a veteran’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively. This turned out to not be the case at all. While Minute was very readable, I found that it lacked the power and [...]
At one point in 2004-2005 I was tearing through a book or two a week. In retrospect, it was a phenomenal time. I’d stay in for hours at a time on a weeknight or weekend and just read. Since my earliest memories, reading has been one of my favorite experiences. For a while, I remember [...]
There was an article in Wired last month about a woman who seems to remember everything. You could literally name a date from her life and she could tick off hundreds of events from that date. She got a ton of publicity which eventually attracted the Wired mag writer. The article reaches the new conclusion [...]
One of the reasons I love writing is that forming coherent thoughts ends up changing my mind. And sometimes my behavior. My previous post on what we value ended up being one of those things. We live in a world of insane inattention. For me it started back in 96 with AIM. You can sign-on [...]
What is it that we value? As a society at large, I’ve heard a lot of suggestions. That we value our environment. That we value our children. Education. Progress. Peace. Health. Knowledge. Kindness. All kinds of stuff. I never really thought long and hard about this question, and now that I’m thinking about it, these [...]
For the past few years the one thought that has never been far from mind is my “could vs should” debate. Essentially, I think we’ve become a society that has stopped asking if we “should” do something and instead default to if we “could” do it. “Can we get away with it?” has become our [...]
I’ve long listened to the discussion between being “religious” vs “spiritual.” Of late, I’ve heard of a lot of fatigue with people classifying themselves as “spiritual.” I suspect this has to do with how nebulous a term “spiritual” actually is and how many people have chosen to identify as such. There’s a great article in [...]