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Words are strange things. They have no weight, take up no space, and can disappear almost as quickly as they are spoken. Yet a sentence that took someone five seconds to type can remain inside another person for years. The person who wrote it may not remember it at all. That is one of the […]

I thought adulthood would be about freedom. I would have my own house, make my own decisions, and eat cake for dinner if I wanted. All of that turned out to be true. What no one mentioned was that I would spend most of that freedom scheduling appointments, changing filters, buying replacement parts, and trying

Henley is our spirited not so little orange cat with an enormous and decidedly un-cat-like personality. He is the undisputed star of our home and, by a fairly wide margin, its most popular family member. He greets every visitor, appoints himself the sleeping companion of every overnight guest whether they like it or not, and

Every profession has a cost of doing business. There are the obvious costs, like advertising, supplies, insurance, and taxes. Then there are the costs no one includes on a spreadsheet because they are harder to calculate. In my business, one of those costs is coming into contact with people who become obsessed with me. This

Poor Monday.  Monday has become the official scapegoat for everything. It’s the day we blame for alarm clocks, traffic, inboxes, and the fact that weekends insist on ending. Monday has such a terrible reputation that people write songs about disliking it. Personally, I think Monday gets more blame than it deserves. The day that really

I think one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that everyone else has it all figured out. The better marriage. The better job. The better body. The better house. The better life. From where we’re standing, everyone else’s grass looks lush and green while ours looks like it desperately needs fertilizer and a

I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump lately. Not his politics. Not his policies. Not his hair. Not his bitcoin. No. I’ve been thinking about his confidence. Actually… Confidence isn’t even the right word. It’s something bigger than that. It’s the remarkable freedom of a person who appears completely unconstrained by yesterday’s version of himself. He

Everyone needs a hobby. I’m endlessly fascinated by the things people choose to do with their time. Some people garden. Some restore classic cars. Others train for marathons. And then there are those remarkable individuals who dedicate themselves to becoming deeply invested in the lives of people they watch from afar, filling in the gaps

  The other day I was listening to a podcast featuring Harvard professor and behavioral scientist Leslie John. She studies something called self-disclosure, which is simply the act of sharing things about ourselves with other people. Her research focuses on how those moments of sharing create closeness between people. As I listened, I found myself

Every so often, someone tells me they’ve known my name for years.  Sometimes they’ve been reading my blog. Sometimes they’ve followed my website. Sometimes they’ve simply known who I was long before we ever met. Every time it happens, I’m caught a little off guard.  I usually laugh and joke that it makes me feel