Making it Stick, Lesson 1: Simplicity

I’ve been reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. The book is about how to make your ideas sticky, so that people immediately get them, remember them, and act on them. The Heaths describe 6 ways make your ideas more sticky: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and stories.
I [...]

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little voice vs. open mind

I like to think of myself as open minded. But sometimes I realize that, well, my mind isn’t as open as I’d like.
Over the course of several weeks, I read several mentions of the same book, Momma Zen. I’ve been writing about parenting and yoga and how one informs the other in my life, and the book seemed [...]

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“Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.”

How great is that quote? It’s from Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I’m particularly taken with it as I’ve been thinking about how since I’ve recommitted to yoga, it’s impacted both my work and my home life in a positive way. Which is funny, because I’ve [...]

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The Fog of Life

I watched the Fog of War last night – what a great movie. In it, McNamara and Morris highlight 11 life lessons. I’m not saying that raising kids is like going to war, but I will admit that some days it feels like it. Many of the principles apply pretty well to raising children, so [...]

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Hiring Great People

I’ve never really thought of myself as someone who is good at hiring people. I tend to listen for what I want to hear, and I really want to like job candidates, which gets in the way of serious evaluation.When it came to hiring a nanny, I did a pretty poor job the first time, [...]

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