Looking For Lessons
One thing that I've discovered to be immensely helpful in writing is the process of coming away from a difficult situation and trying to find the positive in it. I write on here once a day, which means that I treat every interaction I have with the world as an opportunity to find something interesting, to uncover some insight for myself, so that maybe I'll be able to distill something worth sharing. Time is short,...
Who Do You Think You're Talking To?
Politically, my mother is a fairly liberal person, the kind that (probably) voted for Obama, and my father is a much more conservative, Rush Limbaugh-listening Republican type. This can lead to interesting conversations that start to bubble up during the holidays, but the more important implication is that it's impossible for anyone talking to me to make broad, incendiary statements about Republicans or Democrats without indirectly insulting one of my parents. This usually doesn't bother...
The Moral Equivalent of Smoking
On a day that's not anywhere close to New Year's, I figured I'd go back and review my own resolution from last January and see just how much progress I had made. In doing so, I started thinking about resolutions in general. Very often, people set out to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop eating so much, or eliminate any other number of bad habits. These types of goals tend to be much harder when they...
Car Inspector
I took my car into a mechanic recently and, no surprise, turns out there's a lot that's wrong with it, and a lot of things that need fixing. Nothing urgent, they tell me, but if anything ever goes wrong, the insinuation is that I'll only have myself to blame... The problem with these kinds of situations is that the person who's giving us advice is also the person that has something to sell us. So...
The People Who Change the World...
...are the ones who are insane enough to think that they can. There will always be people who will say to you, "Don't do that." This is how becoming a little hard of hearing can be a major virtue. Someone once asked Helen Keller if she thought there was anything worse than being blind. She replied, "Yes, there is something worse...it would be to be able to see, but to not have any vision." In...
SEO Won't Cut It
People tend to get really interested when I mention that I know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Their ears perk up and they start to poke at me with questions in an effort to learn how to get themselves ranked higher on Google. And that's great, because I'm thrilled to be surrounded by people and friends who are taking an interest in something that is not only terribly academic but might also help them accomplish...
The Story of Al Gore...
...is that he told a story. Ever seen An Inconvenient Truth? A lot of the movie is him sharing personal details about his own life, about growing up on a farm, about the values instilled in him from a very young age. This has nothing to do with global warming, so why include it? It's powerful. People can argue back and forth until they're blue in the face about whether or not the facts he...
Back to the Future
In Back to the Future, Part 2, Marty McFly inadvertently alters the course of history and created a dystopian version of the 1985 that he lives in. In trying to explain what the heck is going on, Doc Brown draws a line on a chalkboard. "Think of time as a straight line," he explains. He draws another line that forks off of the main line in the middle and eventually runs parallel with the main...
The Missing Link
Think about how Craigslist and its postings worked to replace newspaper ads. Or how Wikipedia and its throes of contributors managed to replace Encyclopedia Britannica as people's main source of browsing new information. Or how Barack Obama managed to raise millions of dollars online by spreading himself through advocates online. How does fundraising work in the age of the Internet? How do non-profits reach the masses and ask them to contribute? How do they reward...
Proximity and Negativity
All things are never equal, but all things considered, I'd be willing to bet that the lifestyle of the average American of probably better than that of the average American of 100 years ago. You could argue that the difference between the high and low points has stratified to a greater extent, and you might be right, but most people in the United States have it pretty good. And yet, lots of people are miserable....