Humor

My girlfriend and I have often talked about having kids. It’s fun to speculate: What they’d look like, if they’d get her smarts, my sense of humor.

Coincidentally, my family bought us a DNA test last Christmas. It was a mildly awkward present to receive. It wasn’t like we lived in Alabama and “needed to be sure”. But we didn’t think anything more of it. It would be a fun exercise, to find out what we are and if we have healthy ancestors. We both swabbed the inside of our mouth and sent it off for analysis. …

Self | Life Lessons

You’ve already been taking a prescription of life’s hard truths. Some of you have been guzzling them in back alleys and stealing them from your grandmother’s medicine cabinet.

Others have been ignoring doctors' orders. Yes, life is beautiful and full of pleasant surprises. But it also dishes out hard and heavy lessons. It’s better a dose of reality now than an overdose in the eleventh hour.

Surviving a universe that doesn’t care

The self-absorption paradox puts us in a tough predicament. As we become more self-aware, we become less likely to make social mistakes, but more likely to torture ourselves over past mistakes. …

Self | Life Lessons

Smart people fail for many reasons that don’t involve laziness. They don’t network. They act like jerks. They stop learning. They’re disorganized. They’re arrogant. I could go on.

Meanwhile, most highly successful people aren’t exceptional humans. Don’t let that VP title fool you. They weren’t winning any Math Bowls. But they had other skills.

My girlfriend and I were discussing a mutual friend, who is trying to go into her field (academia) and work for her directly. She was expressing her many concerns about his level of motivation and ability.

Finally, I said, “Laura, I mean, I think we both…

Love | Poetry | Life Lessons

The next day, wake up a little earlier than usual. Go to work. Do a bit more than you did the day before. Skip the burger and eat healthy.

Join a gym and do an overdue workout. Stare at the treadmill timer for all 27 minutes. Even better — put a towel over it and lose track of time.

Watch the stars dance in your eyes as you descend deeper into each squat.

When you get home, call an old friend. No, not that one, the other one you should have called years ago. Talk about the old times. Talk…

Self | Business

It’s 8 PM. Most employees are gone and you’re alone in a huge office.

You leave and it's dark out. The parking lot is empty. You go home and can’t stop thinking about work. You wake up at 3 AM in sweats and respond to a few work emails.

Saturday you come back. Sunday, you are working from home.

CEOs live this life for years. And, somehow, many of them seem full of energy and happy. How do they do it? What can we learn from them?

The truth on their drug use

There’s a stereotype that CEOs are relaxing, doing blow, and getting the overnight…

Creativity | Life Lessons | Self

Paul McCartney wrote the famous Beatles’ song, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” after overhearing an African man in a club say, “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da — life goes on brah. Nutin’ to worry about.”

The phrase got stuck in his head and, years later, became a song that made him millions.

And while I don’t anticipate writing any smash-hit songs, I did start writing phrases down five years ago. Anything I overheard in a public place that caught my attention, went into my sticky-notes app.

This exercise became a surprising source of empathy and inspired my best writing ideas.

A glimpse of motherhood

I used to frequent the South…

Humor | Self Improvement

I was having people over for a cocktail party.

We were a late-20s crowd. We still had a bit of party in us — but not to the point of ending the night streaking around the neighborhood.

My slightly deformed golden retriever, Ottie, had RSVP’d as well. I’d asked him beforehand, “Are you going to behave? Please?”

9/11 was my generation's JFK Assassination moment. Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

I was droning my way through a calculus class in my senior year of high school. Our teacher, who also taught theater, was predictably dramatic in his discussion of anti-derivatives.

We heard a knock on the classroom door. It was my history teacher, Dr. Savas, who leaned in and said, “A plane has hit a building in NYC. We are showing it in the auditorium.”

Our teacher, always militant in his curriculum, made us stay for the remaining…