“You can’t know what’s really happening in this loud, crazy world, or in a single human heart, unless we are fully present in the moment, and listen. We are the characters in the daily dramas that make up the moments of our life, and our days, and then all of history. Stories exist wherever we […]
Tag Archives: life lessons
Stories–Part 2: Telling Stories
I read a fascinating Fast Company article the other day, describing the emergence of a new position in the C-Suite of a number of large companies–that of Chief Storytelling Officer (CSO). While the article, written by Michael Grothaus, notes that perhaps the first person to hold the CSO title was Nelson Farris at Nike in […]
Stories–Part I: My Stories
I love reading, listening to and telling stories; I always have. I think we all do. From the time I was a small child I loved hearing bedtime stories. Even before I understood the symbols on the pages as letters of the alphabet, I tried to link together the drawings and pictures in my Little Golden […]
If It’s Sauce for the Goose, Is it Gravy for the Gander?
At the end of the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, along with seven other 19- and 20-year old, testosterone-overloaded running mates from the Pittsburgh suburb where I grew up, I headed for the Jersey Shore. We piled into two cars and, armed with swim trunks, sandals, a couple of t-shirts, a few […]
Can We Take Two Minutes?
The Gambler’s Folly
Cluelessness–What We Don’t Know (Part III–Are We Hopelessly Clueless?)
At a press conference on June 6, 2002 at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, in response to a question about the quality of intelligence about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered his now-famous quote about “unknown unknowns:” “There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. […]
Cluelessness: What We Don’t Know (Part II–Everyday Anosognosia?)
A news story, reported by Michael A. Fuoco in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1995, began: “ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY, SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he […]
What is it About A$$holes?
You are driving down the highway, travelling with the flow of traffic as you near a construction zone where the traffic narrows from three lanes, then to two, and finally to one lane. You’ve merged into the single lane, when you see, in your side-view mirror, a black Dodge Ram pickup truck blithely cruising along the shoulder […]
Landing in the Fog
While Albert Hammonds was almost correct in his 1972 song, It Never Rains In Southern California, that doesn’t mean the sun is always shining. We call our own special brand of fog marine layer. It’s a dense layer of fog that rolls in off the ocean in Southern California, drawn in by the warm air over the […]