Holidays like Halloween may have pagan roots in harvest festivals as well as in the Christian tradition to honor the dead. Today, that history has morphed into Fall symbols like pumpkins, shafts of wheat and bonfires, and the ghoulish and gory like skeletons, ghosts and the undead. The holiday fits in today’s gender-fluid world, with […]
Stock market watchers often talk about whether “this time it’s different”: Does this bull market reflect the same conditions as the last one? Is this downturn different from the one just before the last recession? This time, is it different? Almost always, circumstances might be different, but business cycles are more or less the same. […]
For about a week now, most of us have been hunkered down in our little COVID caves under a “social isolation” directive. Some of the rest of you are under strict shelter-in-place orders. Here’s the bottom line: We will get through this. And not in a dystopian, I Am Legend kind of way, though if […]
This time of year we often look back over the past 12 months, and as we close out 2019, we also close out a decade. Time goes by in the blink of an eye, and the past ten years are only different in that there has been more change than ever before. That will only be exceeded by […]
My mother was a strong and resilient woman, creative and resourceful, quick to help and even quicker to laugh. I adored her. People often commented that she’d had a hard life, and she always countered that it was full of interesting experiences. I loved the stories she told about her life, but I also wished […]
If all the pink hearts and chocolates you’ve been seeing in stores since just after Christmas weren’t enough of a giveaway, it’s Valentine’s Day. The first conversational candy hearts were crafted by the New England Confectioners Company in 1866. Yes, that means we’ve been doing this for over 150 years. And this year you probably […]
I’m a huge movie buff. In a different life, I would have been behind a camera, capturing people’s stories on film. One of the best stories I’ve seen on film is a movie making the festival circuit this year, Blindspotting. Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame, along with longtime friend, poet and fellow actor Rafael Casal, […]
You all know I love to plan. The power of planning comes from setting your intention, and taking action to make it happen. It’s about dreaming, but it’s more about doing. Starting a new year is a perfect time to set your intention on how you want to affect the world outside your personal sphere. […]
This month my book club read Where the Right Went Wrong, E.J. Dionne Jr’s book about conservativism in America, a selection made long before Election Day, and back when we thought we’d be in a different place politically when we met to discuss it. One of our group told us how she was anxious about […]
Colleague and sketch guy extraordinaire, Carl Richards, has a new book called The One-Page Financial Plan. My work is all about organizing, simplifying, and getting clarity around what really matters for you, and a one-page plan sounded awesome. As I often do, I test-drove this process myself and here’s what my One-Page Plan looks like: […]