We ask ourselves this question all the time, or one like it: Why can’t we just move back to Dallas? Why can’t I just go back to my old job? Why can’t we just keep our old car? Why can’t we just get back together? We get the idea that back then, everything was fine. […]
It’s a common refrain on my Facebook feed: millennials, or maybe liberals, or immigrants, or whatever group is in the news today for demanding something the poster thinks is unreasonable, are whiners or freeloaders or entitled or idiots or maybe criminals. Their request is ridiculous, and they should all just shut their mouths and go […]
If there’s a secret to life, I don’t know it. If there’s a formula for success other than working hard and keeping my word, I’ve never seen it. If there’s a way to guarantee that my country remain a place my kids can be proud of, as I am, as my father is, I’m not […]
We hate not knowing. We hate being wrong. We hate uncertainty. Fortunately, our technology gives us a level of control over our lives no other humans have had in history. We can control our schedules down to the minute. We can control the food that goes into our bodies–where it comes from, how it’s stored, […]
Many of us spend our lives gaining, earning, accumulating the objects we think we need to be happy. We make our plans, marry the right people, enter the right professions. We make our money, save, invest, borrow, overextend ourselves, claw our way back to where we were. And the whole time, we tell ourselves we’re […]
In 1998, a political storm engulfed the president of the United States. President Clinton, confirming suspicions many people shared about his character, was caught in an affair with a young White House intern. When he perjured himself about the affair before Congress, his political enemies used his statements to make him the second president ever […]
We’re busy. Busier, probably, than any culture has ever been. And leading is hard. It takes work, and it carries no guarantees that the work will bear fruit. It might lead to nothing more than unhappy followers. No wonder most of us don’t want to do it. Instead, we wait for the leader who thinks […]
Some of us have a hard time controlling our tempers. We’ve all seen it: a friendly conversation turns into a mild disagreement, and one participant seems to lose all sense of perspective. A man might become visibly angry, might raise his voice, might adopt a threatening posture. A woman might become irate and start shaking […]
There are moments it’s hard to tell the truth. When the boss asks about the project we haven’t finished yet, when the police officer asks how fast we think we were going, when our child asks us to come upstairs and play after a long day’s work when all we want to do is sit […]
It’s easy to convince ourselves that people are trying to hurt us. When the waiter brings the wrong meal, or the nurse is slow to come to our room, or the boss criticizes our work; when the auto mechanic fails to fix the problem; when somebody swerves in front of us in traffic, or steps […]