I recently finished reading an excellent book and in the process learned an invaluable lesson.
The name of this book isn’t important. The subject matter isn’t important. And the author isn’t important.
Continue readingLooking Back On Books Gone By
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Sometimes It Pays To Be Insane
It’s been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. People use this definition to justify giving up one course of action in favor of another. Conventional wisdom would have us believe this is the intelligent choice. But conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Continue readingHow Do You Know When You Know?
“I know” and “I already know this” are two phrases that seem to be everywhere. Try telling something to a teenager. If you get six words out before they snarl back with, “I know,” you’re lucky. No matter what you were about to tell them, it seems they were one step ahead of you. Like Kreskin, they know.
Continue readingNice to Meet You. Want to Get Married?
Imagine meeting someone for the first time. He or she approaches you, introduces themselves, then proposes marriage.
Insane, right? Not likely to lead to marriage, right? Of course, nobody would be foolish enough to think an approach like this would work.
Well then, why the flip do so many people try to persuade like this?
Continue readingThe Power of Pretense
“If we want people to behave in a certain manner, we must set the stage and give them a cue. This is true also when it is ourselves we want to induce. There is no telling how deeply a mind may be affected by the deliberate staging of gestures, acts and symbols.
Pretense is often an indispensable step in the attainment of genuineness. It is a form into which genuine inclinations flow and solidify.”
~ Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
Here are three quick lessons we can take from Hoffer’s quote:
Continue readingEight Ugly Truths About Human Nature
People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and pride themselves on their objectivity.
We should never hesitate to ask for help, as many will agree to provide it. But we must never count on it to arrive, as few will actually do so.
Our highest moral values are those we feel we’re being judged on at any given moment.
Continue readingImpaired Vision
My family just returned from a weekend road-trip to Dallas.
I was hungry when we left the house. My wife got hungry about half way there. And my kids started complaining while we were still an hour or so away.
The decision was now unanimous. We decided we’d stop and grab a bite in Waxahachie, a town just outside of Dallas.
Bad decision.
Continue readingWill Time Really Tell?
I can’t think of a time in my life when more turmoil has been going on. Selling a house, building a house, health scares, my son is about to become a teenager, my daughter is about to drive, ad nauseum. Yet in spite of all of this, life is good. Very good. Or is it?
I was recently discussing this turmoil with an older friend who said something that stopped me in my tracks. He consoled me for having to go through such a difficult time and then said that, in looking back, he’d had similar periods in his life and they were always the worst times for him.
Until he described my circumstances as “difficult” I hadn’t even looked at them that way. But what really stunned me was his evaluation that these situations were the “worst times of his life.” This got me thinking…
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