I once had the chance to give a speech in Rome. It was almost a disaster — even if nobody in the room noticed. The client was a large industrial company in Europe. The venue was one of Rome’s fanciest hotels. The audience were a couple dozen senior executives at customers of the industrial client….
I was a math major and had ambitions to be a mathematician. That didn’t happen. Instead, I found myself in the business world. In contrast to writing, which I consider an essential skill for almost any job, advanced mathematical ability is not clearly necessary for most jobs. But as I look back at my career,…
I am quite independent. I vote independent, I work freelance, and I depend solely on myself for nearly everything. I live in a house in a nice neighborhood in Maine. My neighbors are pretty nice people. The other day, a huge piece of one of my trees broke off. Apparently it landed in the street….
Picture this. It is the 1960s. You are a student at the Ogontz Campus of Penn State University, near Philadelphia, where the students and professors who are unable or unwilling to get into the main University Park campus end up. You are majoring in something other than science, but you need a science class to…
Halfway through an hour’s walk in the cold, I was perched on a cinder-block wall in front of the Grace Baptist Church in Portland, Maine. There are not many places to rest in this part of town, and I needed a rest. It was overcast and lightly snowing. A boy who looked about nine years…
There is nothing more rewarding than watching the people you love grow into the people they realize that they want to be. Happy Thanksgiving. Talk to you tomorrow.
When you work for a company — or are building your own business — you need to make compromises for the long-term. You might have to travel a lot, obey commands from a stupid boss, or perform in ways that create ethical compromises. And you’ll probably be working harder, and more hours, than you’d like,…
It was dark in my old home town and I’d just run over a curb. I was piloting the Nissan Rogue Sport SUV I’d rented earlier in the day, driving through Ambler, Pennsylvania, a half-mile from where I went to high school and 400 miles from where I live now. You know how, when you…
We recently decided to use the good silver every day. It feels great. Years ago, my wife received monogrammed silver flatware from her mother, who is now sadly gone. (Her mother had had her own silver, which was stolen; she used the insurance money to replace it with silver monogrammed with her daughters’ initials.) For…