I’m sure you’ve heard it said that there is wisdom in numbering your days. But have you ever numbered your minutes? In less than three weeks, a ten-year chapter of my life will close. When I sat down and did the math, that’s 5,256,000 minutes of my life. Think about that for a second, five million minutes. And more than 1,200,000 of those minutes have been spent at work—one-point-two million minutes. It’s overwhelming to think about it. As I process my resignation and […]
Tag Archives | Gratitude
You Don’t Need Mark Zuckerberg’s Money to Make 2016 Your Best Year Ever
A clever hoax, supposedly validated by Good Morning America, circulated on Facebook recently: Mark Zuckerberg, the thirty-one-year old billionaire founder of the social media giant was giving away a reported $45 billion dollars to users who copied and pasted a status sharing the news. Hundreds of thousands flocked to see if it was true. It wasn’t. But humor me (and yourself) for a minute. Suppose it was true. Suppose you were the beneficiary of a million-dollar windfall. How would your life […]
The Gratitude Cycle
If you pause and look at your life objectively, I think you’ll recognize a real tension that pulls you in opposite directions. On one side there’s gratitude, generosity, and humility. On the other side, you see entitlement, fear, and pride. Every human being is driven by three distinct tensions: Gratitude — Entitlement Generosity — Fear Humility — Pride In every circumstance, every relationship, and every interaction, we feel these polar forces at work. A quick look at American culture and many would argue that we […]
Four Words That Will Change Your Life
There are four words that have more power to enrich your life than you can dare imagine. But, when I tell you what they are, you’ll think that they’re too simple. Curiously, that seems to be the problem. They’re so simple that we often tend to overlook their impact or use them altogether. We either refuse these words altogether or we use them simply out of obligation. The key is learning to use them from the heart—from a place of sincerity. […]
The Truth About Accidents
Learning that my wife was pregnant with identical twin boys while our first son was only eight-months old was not what I had planned for my life. Nearly three years of infertility struggles preceded our first pregnancy–this time it was pure chance. You would think that I would be joyful, but in all honestly, I was angry. As if the financial implications of adding another child wasn’t enough, we were adding two. In addition to that, our small, three bedroom house would […]
What We Can Learn From Kanye West
Kanye West and his audacity are at work again. Back in 2009, West made headlines when he stole the microphone from Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards. West’s disrespect was rooted in his belief that the award belonged to Beyoncé instead. At the 2015 Grammys, West pretended to take the stage and snag the “Album of the Year” award away from rocker, Beck. Again, Kanye was defending Beyoncé who was surprisingly upstaged. After the show, Kanye […]
Thankful for Cancer | A Story to Remind You Not to Skip Thanksgiving
At the age of thirty-two, I was diagnosed with spreading malignant melanoma. That moment was a turning point in my life—a pivotal intersection of the way I wanted my life to go and my new reality. When the doctor’s eyes connected with mine as she gave me my diagnosis, it pierced me in a way I had never experienced. For the first time in my life I faced my own mortality. I can honestly say that I wasn’t afraid of dying. I […]