It’s not: “Do you like it?”
I recently wrote a pilot TV script with a girlfriend of mine. Neither of us had ever done anything like this before. As I sent out the draft to a few trusted friends, I was about to type: “Do you think this is any good?”
But I stopped myself. Instead, I wrote, “Can you please help us make this better?”
I’m a seasoned entrepreneur and a novice writer. I’m learning that the same rules apply to both roles. Whether I’m crafting a script or a business plan, it’s up to me to decide when it is “good enough” for the…
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A less-masked future is near, and our facial expressions will matter more than ever
As vaccination rates increase, we’re getting closer to a future where masks are less of a presence in our lives, and our smiles (and non-smiles) will once again be visible to friends, co-workers, and the strangers we pass on the sidewalk and in the grocery store.
If that sentence didn’t make you smile, please keep reading.
Until I looked into smiling while researching my book Works Well With Others, I didn’t realize how powerful a force it is. The simple act of smiling can change you and everyone around you, and that’s true now more than ever. A smile —…
Train your brain to master the art of controlled anticipation
Tell me if this rings a bell: After a long, long, long stretch of pandemic sameness, you finally have something on the calendar that has you looking forward — maybe a date with a friend you haven’t seen in forever, or a weekend day trip, or just a coveted afternoon alone, away from the people you’ve been cooped up with. You’re excited. You’re eager. You’re ready. And then, suddenly, it’s here and then over — and by the time the next week is out, you can barely remember how great you felt.
It’s natural. We have a tendency to tear…
As the pandemic inches toward completion, here’s an important message: You’re not done yet
Heading into the final stretch of the women’s snowboard cross race at the 2006 Winter Olympics, American Lindsey Jacobellis held a commanding lead over her competitors. As she ascended the second-to-last jump, Jacobellis looked back to confirm her lead, flew into the air, then grabbed her board in a celebratory display of swagger. The showboating would have been no big deal except that when she landed, Jacobellis fell on her backside while Tanja Frieden of Switzerland zoomed past to win the gold medal.
This kind of showy blunder happens all the time in sports. NFL players DeSean Jackson and Danny…
When I let small talk with strangers spiral into something deeper, it became a book about memorable interactions. Here’s what I learned.
The best conversations crack us open. They leave us tender and reeling, alive again with possibility, mesmerized by the uncanny nature of things. When you really “get there” with someone, you reach what my friend once referred to as the wilderness. You may not know where you are anymore, but you know it’s a place of mystery and beauty. You know you want to keep going. I felt this most acutely a few years ago when I kept having unexpected interactions with strangers. I wrote a book about those experiences — No One You Know, which is very much a…
📺 Today’s tip: Choose a television show that showcases kindness.
It’s really okay if all you can manage this weekend is a casual television binge. But if you’re going to veg out, you can still make it life-affirming. Saul Austerlitz writes on Medium about how watching the silly comedy Ted Lasso has been a balm over the past few months; especially, how he values the lead character’s “optimism, his unflagging concern for others, and his insistence — sometimes at the expense of his own self-interest — in demanding kindness of others.”
Choose a show that makes you feel better, not…
🗓 ️Today’s tip: Ask yourself, “Where are the holes in my schedule?”
Fun is all well and good once you’ve finished your homework…but the problem is, when you’re a grownup, you’re never finished with your homework. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t make time for fun. As entrepreneurship coach Charlene Walters writes on Medium, it’s easier than you might think. Look for holes in your schedule, she advises, and “search for places that you have downtime that you can better allocate. Maybe you’re spending 10 hours a week watching Netflix without realizing it. …
🐦 Today’s tip: Set an “unusual bird interruption” alarm.
Sometimes—even when we’re shuffling through the late (we hope!) stages of a pandemic, and feeling burnt-out and spark-less—connecting with life’s joy is as easy as looking at a bird.
This doesn’t even have to mean actual bird-watching — a video works. As the teacher Sophie Lucido Johnson writes in Human Parts:
I have a weekly scheduled “unusual bird interruption” alarm that goes off on my phone every week in my classes. We watch a bird video for something like two minutes. Afterward, I always say, “If you’re stuck or having a…
📋 Today’s tip: Write your to-do list on a piece of paper.
There are so many neat apps and other digital tools out there that promise to keep us more organized and on-task, and thank goodness, in These Scattered Times, for that. But sometimes, as Rosie Spinks writes for Forge, the absolute best to-do list is the one you write down, with a pen, on paper.
This is not just for the usual reasons (writing something by hand can help solidify it in your brain, etc). As Spinks points out, a written to-do list can be as intimate and revealing…
🥝 Today’s tip: Try an unexpected kind of fruit.
It’s really hard to come up with anything interesting to say over dinner when you and your kids have been in the same building staring at screens all day, or when the only new thing on the horizon is a vaccine appointment. But rather than just stare at each other blankly over your next meal or social zoom, try this tip from Catherine Newman: Buy a social fruit.
Newman writes in Cup of Jo, “Whenever someone is shopping or ordering groceries online, I say, ‘Oh, and get some social fruit.’ This…
