Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.
Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?
In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!
Creativity, Innovation & Art 
“Navigators need the stars to structure their voyages, and artists also need other points of reference to stay on course,” from The Artist’s Way Every Day.
Culture, Humanity & Society 
“An amateur shopper is somebody who gets pleasure out of the act of acquisition, but a professional shopper is someone who takes pride in ownership,” from the Tom Peters Cool Friends Interview with Paco Underhill.
Identity, Self & Soul 
“Our players are very skilled, but what really matters is what type of people they are,” from an article about Brazil’s psychological edge.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 
“Big bugs too lovely to squish,” from an art project about beautiful insects.
Meaning, Mystery & Being 
“Every human being is somewhere on the journey between belief and unbelief,” from Saving Casper by my friend Jim Henderson.

Media, Technology & Design 
“The founders threw a bat and a ball on a field and the users invented baseball,” from Duct Tape Marketing.
Nature, Health & Science 
“Smoking cured everything, it could be anything I needed it to be,” from an article about returning to addiction.

People, Relationships & Love “Use your creativity to bring happiness to others,” from the latest edition of the Zappos Culture Book.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling
“Jackhammer some rational thought into the debate,” from Scott Adams.
Success, Life & Career“I don’t want so much hard work and love to disappear in exchange for a pile of cash,” from an essay on your irrelevance strategy. 

Work, Business & Organizations“Don’t make it easy for people to share your product, make it easy for them to share themselves,” from Hugh Macleod.

See you next week!

You can’t cure loneliness with warm bodies.
Only the right bodies.
Joining a club or becoming part of a group or getting hired at a new company quickly buys you a baseline of belonging, but if you start to discover the organization is filled with people whose mental, physical and moral temperament is incompatible with your own, after a while, the loneliness starts to creep back in.
And the problem is, you don’t notice it at first. Because it’s not your typical brand of loneliness. Unlike the bonafide social isolation that leads to chronic inflammationand premature death, this type of loneliness is more insidious. It comes in a much lower dosage. So much so, that when you’re surrounded by other human beings, your eyes actually tell you that you’re not alone.
Which is true. Physically.
But the eyes betray you. They don’t realize warm bodies aren’t enough. They don’t realize loneliness is a multi-sensory experience. They don’t realize feeling less alone in the world requires something beyond material nourishment.
The heart, on the other hand, begs you. It knows what home feels like. It’s knows who the right people are. It knows that true belonging comes from surrounding yourself with like minded, like hearted and like spirited individuals.
That’s the organ you should listen to.
Considering that loneliness has become the most common ailment of the modern world, it may take more work than you thought to satisfy your basic belonging needs.
All hearts on deck, people.

We don’t care if you know everything.

We care if you can participate in deep, thoughtful conversations about anything.

That’s a completely different skill. An infinite game, if you will. In which you’re not playing to win, but playing to keep the game going. Where it’s less about intellectual firepower and more about curiosity and vulnerability and enthusiasm and patience and maybe even a little bit of wow I never thought about it that way.
Improv comedy has a similar model.
My wife and I spent a summer taking classes at a local theater company. Not only were they some of the funniest moments of our lives, but some of the healthiest communication tools we learned as a couple.
As our instructors told us, it’s not about being the funniest person on stage, constantly inventing punch lines to get a cheap laugh from the audience. It’s about saying yes and serving the scene. It’s about looking into someone’s eyes and feeling their reactions. It’s about responding honestly to people’s realities. And it’s about keeping the ball in play no matter what, fully committing to whatever rabbit hole you go down.
Conversation should be like that.
Songwriting has a similar model as well.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite books, Unintentional Music, a program for using openness and acceptance to get the most out of the creative process. The subject matter of the book mostly revolves around music, but there’s still a lot we can glean from an conversational standpoint.
As the author writes, focus on the music people do not intend to make. Align yourself with the flow of process. See disturbing or unwanted things as potentially meaningful. Stay open to what you are typically closed to. Rather than judging experiences, just be with what is. When something arises, let it come, and when something disappears, let it go. And learn to love whatever happens and trust that it will lead you to where you ultimately need to go.
Conversation should be like that.
And the best part is, you don’t need to be a know-it-all to make that kind of interaction happen.
If you want to participate in deep, thoughtful conversation about anything, it’s all in how you approach the exchange. It’s all about what you see when you see people.
Because when everyone is operating from pure intention and passionate attention, the rest of the exchange takes care of itself.

You can’t teach thoughtfulness.
What you can do is create a system that makes thoughtfulness easier, reminds people to keep practicing it and rewards them for doing so consistently.
Kahnoodle is an app that gives you points every time you do something thoughtful for your lover, like bringing home flowers, writing a sweet note or doing the dishes. You can even cash your points in for discounts at popular stores. And if you haven’t done anything in a while, the app sends a push notification to nudge you in a thoughtful direction.
The reviews were through the roof.
Women said it helped them feel like they were dating again. Men said it rekindled their relationship’s romantic flame. Even marriage counselors said they prescribed it to their clients who were having problems communicating.
Kahnoodle dubbed this process, “filling people’s love tanks.”
Isn’t that the perfect definition of thoughtfulness?
It’s just sweet enough to be memorable, just visual enough to be useful, and just simple enough to be effective.
Filling people’s love tanks. Awesome.
So I couldn’t help but wonder, why stop at couples? Why limit thoughtfulness to just our romantic partners? Shouldn’t we extend that same practice of care and generosity and delight to people we aren’t sleeping with?
After all, relationships work when we work at them. And whether it’s business or personal, it’s less about labor and time and more about intention and attention.
As I go about my day, one of the questions I try to ask myself is:
“Who do I love that needs to see this?”
Maybe it’s an article I find, maybe it’s a product I buy, maybe it’s a picture I take, maybe it’s a person I meet, or maybe it’s a book I finish. But whatever it is that I experience, I always try to observe it with a filter of thoughtfulness. 
And then I share it with them. 
That way, the people that I love, know that my thoughts are full of them.
Because thoughtfulness isn’t a big thing, it’s a thousand little things.
And if we need an app to nudge us along in the right direction, so be it.
Whatever it takes to fill people’s love tanks.

Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.
Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?
In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!
Creativity, Innovation & Art 
“In songwriting, the real trick is to be the spider that doesn’t get caught in its own web,” from an interview with Paul Weinfeld.
Culture, Humanity & Society 
“We live in an alpha world, one in which the strong and popular and smart and fast win,” from Rob Bell’s blog.

Identity, Self & Soul 
“Maturity is always a return to reality about yourself,” from Gentle Persuasion.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 
“A woman who died ten years ago, and she can’t stop talking about it,” from an interview with Amy Hempel in The Paris Review.

Meaning, Mystery & Being 
“Human beings are notoriously lousy at predicting what will make them happy,” from an article in Psychology Today.

Media, Technology & Design 
“Technology doesn’t just do things for us, it does things to us, changing not just what we do, but who we are,” from the brilliant Sherry Turkle.

Nature, Health & Science 
“Science doesn’t want to take god away from people,” from a report on NPR.

People, Relationships & Love “Giving away little margins of time you never will miss will become riches to someone,” from my favorite book, Try Giving Yourself Away.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling
“By the time poor children are three, researchers believe they have heard on average about thirty million fewer words than children the same age from better off families,” from an article about poverty’s vocabulary.

Success, Life & Career“Don’t stop believing unless your dream is stupid,” from Kid President.

Work, Business & Organizations“I want to hire people with humble ambition,” from The Corner Office.

See you next week!

Every once in a while, life takes me out of myself.
After a certain amount of time and speed and space and pressure, I start to lose touch with my identity. I get stuck in a system of other people’s expectations and agendas that puts me at odds with myself. And all of the sudden I realize, oh crap, if I don’t find a way to get back to normal, to exist in a manner that makes sense to me, I’m going to freak out.
And it’s not just me, either.
I once read an interview about Jerry Seinfeld’s writing process. He said that if he can’t tinker, he grows anxious. That if he can’t create and arrange his ideas around the world’s messy confusions and trivial irritants, life isn’t fun for him.
Interesting.
Maybe this experience of existential distress touches us all. Maybe these mini identity crises are more common than we realize. Maybe we all have those boundary moments when our motivation for doing something is, quite simply, just to feel normal again. Even if only for a short while.
And if that means going for a run at dawn when it’s dark and there’s nobody in the world but you and the stars, so be it.
It’s a recalibration of the soul.
A portable, purposeful and private sanctuary to reconnect with the self, the body, the spirit and the heart. A sacred space that holds a sense of predictability and routine and control and brings some measure of coherence back to your life. A highly human experience, free of the existential torrents of life, free of the crazy demands of others, that gives us cognitive richness and psychic nourishment.
Whatever it takes to carve a path back to yourself.

Fear is a significant factor in most people’s lives.

And if your organization wants to matter to those people, you need a tool that helps customers feel less afraid. Some platform, some interaction or some mechanism that gets their jitters out and gives them something to face the world with.
Covestor is the world’s largest online platform for investment management. It’s a world of great investors that allows you to automatically mirror their strategies, trade for trade, all from the comfort and safety of your own account.
But that’s still scary. When money moves, people take notice.
Covestor understands this fear, so their site let users try out the service with a hundred thousand virtual dollars, simulated functionality, account mirroring, performance tracking, for free, with no obligation and no payment details required.
It’s a safe haven. An interesting place where people can interact. And a simple, smart and social platform, free from the constraints of regulation, that identifies the line between what financial companies can do and can’t do, and lets people play right on top of it.
Most importantly, it’s a compelling case for why investing doesn’t have to be scary. And it’s a reminder to people that they’re all good investors, they just don’t know it.
Are you letting fear boss your customers around?

Reinventing yourself isn’t about changing everything.

It’s about springing yourself past a frontier and letting the constellation of your identity expand so you can see the beginning of a different and more courageous dream.
It’s about letting go of everything you’ve tried and built and accomplished and accumulated so far, except for the person you’ve become, and using that as the raw material for whatever comes next.
It’s about interrogating what it is that you’re intrinsically the best in the world at, that you have been put on this earth to do, that you’ve already been doing your whole life, that nobody can take away from you, and that people will value and pay money for.
It’s about evolving your work strategy based on market feedback, changing your path path to get somewhere new based on what you’ve learned along the way, keeping your career in permanent beta and remaking yourself as the world changes.
And how will you know if you’ve done a good job reinventing yourself?
If you feel like a whole new person, and yet, more like yourself than ever, you did a good job.

I’ve been an inventor my whole life.

Making things has always been the most natural way for me to engage with the world. When I get up in the morning, there’s this mechanism inside me that wonders what I’m supposed to make next. And it’s relentless. Like the junkie who walks thirty miles to get twenty dollars, the mechanism doesn’t shut up until it finally gets its daily fix.
That’s why, if I don’t spend at least a little time each day, tinkering away, I grow restless. I don’t feel like myself. And I won’t feel like myself until I make something.
But that’s just me.
Or is it?
Maybe it’s not a personality thing. Maybe it’s a person thing.
Human beings, by their very nature, are builders. We make art to capture our feelings, we make tools to amplify our potential, we make games to express our playfulness and we make rituals to celebrate our experiences.
We’re created to create.
And we should never stop. No matter how good, how popular, how useful or how meaningful our creations are, we should never stop inventing. Ever. Because when we stop making things, we lose our innovative edge. And when we lose our innovative edge, we fail to serve the progress of humanity.
Fear not innovation. Fear only that which dims your capacity to innovate.
Stay calm and carry on?
More like get excited and make things.

If your idea is everywhere, you win.

The hard part is, millions of people around the world are trying to make their ideas more popular than yours. And with the exception of the few that hit a run of dumb luck, most of the ideas you want to spread, won’t. Most of your marketing attempts are reminders of just how deaf the world really is.
Even the big guys, the companies with the most brilliant and expensive marketing campaigns out there, fail to attract more than a modest amount of attention.
But don’t let that be another excuse not to try.
They might not make you any money, but if your ideas make you excited to get up in the morning, if they help you find a home for all of your talents, and if they make meaning in the world to the people who matter most, you win too.