Category: Personal
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My Neuroses’ Playlist & Another Modest Proposal
My Neuroses’ Playlist In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how earworms plague me. There are four flavors of earworm: For example, I watched the end of the movie Kingsman, which features Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love; it stayed in my head for days. In fact, just writing that last sentence brought it back. For example, the other morning I…
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No Experience is Wasted…
…if you can think analogically: a mini-memoir. Last week, a young colleague and I visited La Profesora’s Digital Skills class at Portland State University. We were there to talk about career readiness and what my friend Rishad Tobaccowala, in his terrific book Restoring the Soul of Business, calls “the turd on the table.”** In this case, the…
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Wonder Moments
When something makes you notice and appreciate the technological marvels that we all take for granted, pay attention. Last Wednesday, my first meeting was a Zoom with one person in Warsaw (6,000 miles away) and another in Palo Alto (a mere 350 miles away). I’m in Los Angeles visiting family. I have global meetings like…
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Thought Flavors
Different tools can unleash different kinds of thinking, including fountain pens (a recent interest). Lately, I’ve gotten into fountain pens. A couple years back, my friend Rob gave me a nice Pilot. Then, after they went to Paris on a long-delayed mother/daughter trip, Kathi and Helena brought back a Waterman for me. I had an…
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Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir
Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…
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Am I Becoming an iPhone Recluse?
I started experiencing profound relief every night when I powered down my smartphone. Why is that? Overture: What follows is an atypical piece from me. It’s a lightly-edited journal entry that explores territory adjacent to “My Quest to be Whelmed” from a month ago. Soundtrack: I’ve never suggested music to have playing when reading one…
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My Quest to be Whelmed
It’s hard to watch the news and harder to talk about it with people who might disagree. I’m overwhelmed. Are you? I’m a lucky guy. I have a happy marriage. I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. We live in a lovely suburb just remote enough that there’s not much crime, and we can still get…
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A Marketing Win
Since so much of the news is dyspeptic and terrifying, here’s a story about how 1-800-FLOWERS creates happiness and profit at the same time. My last piece was grim, so I wanted to explore something smart that 1-800-FLOWERS does that drives business and profit while also making its customers happy. 1-800-FLOWERS.com owns Harry & David as…
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A Scary Time
Four shorter pieces this time: the so-called L.A. riots, the middle east, more on AI, and what would we call a third party? I’m not generally anxious, but the news of the last two weeks tested that. Here are reflections about two major news stories, one unsettling NYT article that deserves more attention, and my…