Here’s the dilemma:  we all want to be fabulous and awesome and just plain astonishing, and we all want to be lionized and revered and honored for our greatness. We just don’t want to have to work too hard to make that happen. So how do you achieve genius status without wearing yourself out? Since I had no idea, I consulted the experts. In Outliers: The Story of Success, New Yorker writer and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell posited that there’s really no such thing as … [Read more...]

“Where’s my Fifty Shades of Gray?” You could hear disgruntled publishers pounding their desks from one side of Manhattan to the other. They all recognized, even though they didn’t want to put it in words, that their ability to identify the next hot book had withered. Little that they published was selling well. So they had to have a new strategy to find something to bring to market. That strategy amounted to overpaying radically for books from self-published authors who managed to … [Read more...]

I’ve never failed to finish a distance race—a marathon, half marathon, or triathlon—and I’ve done a couple dozen in the last ten years. That changed a week ago Sunday, at the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington D.C. It just wasn’t my day. Marathoning certainly has a physical component.  You have to have a base level of fitness, but in reality, it’s much more mental than anything else. If you can do a 10K, you can almost certainly train yourself to get to a half marathon.  … [Read more...]

A bank here in southern California whose name I won’t mention (but it rhymes with Hells Margo) has an ad on a billboard that bugs the heck out of me. It shows a texted conversation: Sent you $$$ for your birthday!  :)             Thx!!! Who is there in my life to whom I’m close enough that I would send money as a birthday present and yet at the same time I wouldn’t be willing to pick up the phone to wish a happy birthday? And who is there in my life whom, if … [Read more...]

Bill Bennett is an odd choice for self-appointed moral scourge.  Our former Secretary of Education, who rails against sex, drugs, and probably rock and roll, thinks nothing of dropping Charles Barkley-sized bankrolls in Vegas and, when it comes to packing on the excess pounds, leaves no Twinkie behind. And yet, when Bennett talks about what’s wrong with college, it’s time to sit up straight, stop whispering to the kid at the next desk, and pay attention.  Because plenty’s wrong with … [Read more...]