Backing up Blind.
Several years ago, my brother and his wife were moving back to our home state after some schooling. I was standing with our Dad on his long driveway while my brother tried to back a huge moving trailer into it – straight and clean. He was struggling a bit to get it into position. I […]
Three-lane Future.
Do you have a minute? It’s a weird week, so you might have a minute. I’m going to walk us through an imagination exercise. There is no pressure, I just want you to explore with me. Ok? Ready? We’re going to imagine three parallel tracks our lives could take from right here, right now. For […]
The Earlier Version of You.
Last winter, I had a day where I felt completely steady walking into something and completely unsteady walking out of it. I was only about ten miles from my house. I went into a company on a beautiful crisp, clear morning to give an in-person presentation. I thought it went so well. But when I […]
The Small Thing That Won’t Let Go.
We recently had our Primary Program at my church – a well-rehearsed hour filled with songs and speaking parts presented by the children in the congregation from ages 3-11. Darren, for the life of him, has not been able to get one of the songs out of his head. It has gotten to the point […]
When the bill breaks.
In 2009, behavioral economists Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava designed a series of studies to observe how people handle cash. They found that a single large bill carried more psychological weight than the same amount divided into smaller ones. Participants who received a fifty-dollar bill tended to keep it intact. Those given the same amount […]
The Wizard of Oz — and Remastering.
As some of you probably know, maybe even because I’ve told you, The Wizard of Oz is not in Kansas anymore. It’s in Las Vegas. And it’s incredible. According to the Wall Street Journal, Steven Hickson, director for AI foundation research at Google DeepMind, The Wizard of Oz project was “Very, very, very big and […]
Samuel Langley – and getting in our own way.
In the early 1900s, Samuel Pierpont Langley — the namesake of Langley Air Force Base — was one of the most respected scientific minds in the United States. As the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a pioneer in aviation, he had funding from the U.S. War Department ($50,000 according to Wikipedia), access to leading […]
Chocolate Tasting — and 8 flavors of anger.
In 1929, at the age of 13, Roald Dahl attended Repton School, a prestigious boys’ boarding school in Derbyshire, England. It was during his time at Repton that the Cadbury company sent sample chocolate bars to the school for the boys to taste and evaluate. “It was a tradition that Cadbury’s, the great chocolate manufacturers, […]
Asking for the Can — and Other Reasonable Things
I’m sure there are so many examples of this, but both of mine have to do with Diet Coke.(Insert your own questioning hands emoji here. I don’t mean for Diet Coke to show up in so many of my stories — but here we are.) First example:If you’ve been on a plane anytime in the […]
The Deck We Don’t Use.
The deck we don’t use. Last year we redid our deck. It had been built with basic builder’s grade wood – nothing fancy, and never meant to last. It didn’t hold paint well, it needed constant maintenance, and no matter how many times we power-washed or re-stained, it still looked tired. So we made a […]
