How do you know if you’re hanging around the wrong people?
Instead of making you feel seen, they make you question your value.
And the worst part is, it’s insidious. You wake up one day and realize the world has been dulling and muting your spirit, slowly beating the genius out of you, pushing you to lose a part of yourself that you may never get back.
It’s not a pretty picture.
But there is a secret to snapping out of this mental malaise. You have to reconnect to the unarguable parts of your identity. You have to physically flesh out the things that nobody can take away from you:
What you’ve learned, what you’ve created, what you’re capable of, how you’ve contributed to the group and most importantly, who you’ve become in the process.
Because even if those things aren’t part of their legacy, they’re still part of yours.
And soon enough, you’ll find a group of people who will have eyes to see you.

Cold weather, I can handle.
With the right combination of warm clothing, clunky waterproof boots and a trusty soundtrack of happy music to keep the blood pressure down and the attitude up, I manage to make it out alive.
Cold people, however, I can’t handle.
And not on an individual basis. Dealing with the occasional ice queen or an unfriendly colleague isn’t the end of the world. Coldness in isolation is manageable, and I’ve accepted it as an inescapable feature of the interpersonal landscape.
But coldness en masse, that’s a different story.
I once found myself surrounded by a tribe of uncaring, unthoughtful, cynical, terminally certain people who wouldn’t know warmth if it burned them on the ass.
And it corroded my spirit like an evil rust.

I was born on Valentine’s Day, for god’s sake.
So despite my efforts to infect the tribe with warmth and positivity, and no matter how many times I thought to myself, my love will wear you down eventually, not even the finest thermostat, the softest sweatshirt or the warmest cup of coffee could cure the culture of coldness.
And I eventually realized, I can’t dance to your fidgety tune.
So I took my music elsewhere.

Time is the great thickener of things.
When it comes to your art, time is the strongest agent for making your work robust enough to find its audience and make a difference. More than talent, more than connections, more than money, more than anything, time is the invisible hand that always has your back.
Because no matter how many romantic stories you hear about innovators and artists and computer geniuses who found success early and often, the reality is, that’s rarely the case.
Colonial Sanders didn’t come up with his secret recipe until he was fifty. Momofuku didn’t create instant ramen until he was sixty. Roget didn’t invent the thesaurus until he was seventy. Darwin didn’t publish his theory of evolution until he was fifty. Dostoyevsky didn’t write his greatest novel until he was sixty.
And those guys were in the top one percent of one percent.
For us normies, it will probably be a long time before what we do catches on.
But in the interim, we can hustle while we wait. And we can respect and leverage time in several strategic ways:
From a mindsetperspective, we believe there is something waiting for us and trust our ability to sit down and respond to something.
From a mundaneperspective, we fall in love with the unsexy reality of our work, achieving greatness by doing what is repetitive and dull.
From a movementperspective, it’s about finding ways to stay in the game so you can outlive the critics and still be around when the world is ready for you.
From a momentum perspective, we build an undeniable body of work that grows stronger, brick by brick, and know that we’re better because it took longer.
From a moxieperspective, we keep our hand raised until it’s our turn, and then say yes when luck finds us.
From a motivationperspective, we chase inspiration until it gets winded enough for us to catch it, and don’t let it leave until we pick its pocket.
And the good news is, when we combine the mindset, the mundane, the movement, the momentum, the moxie and the motivation, whatever art we feel called to create, whatever dreams we feel compelled to follow, and whatever change we feel commissioned to make, one thing’s for sure.
It’s only a matter of time.

For many years, I existed in one of two modes:
Rewind or fast forward.
Watching the trailer for my imagined future or studying the game tape from my imperfect past. Rehearsing what I was about to say or revising what I should have said. Learning from yesterday or lusting for tomorrow.
Which left me little time to exist in any of the other, better, healthier modes:
Play and pause and stop and slow.
Sorry. Too busy checking off goals and chasing dreams and making plans to press any of those buttons. 
Which seemed romantic and commendable and productive at the time. Besides, I liked who I was in those two modes. Hiding inside my head was an integral part of my identity.
But here’s what I didn’t realize.
When dwelling on yesterday and dreaming about tomorrow takes up too much of today, you lose the ability to be present. When you’re always focused on becoming and achieving and attaining, trying to get somewhere other than where you already are, you experience stress. And when you’re so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there, you miss out on life.
I always loved what Eckhart Tolle said about this:
“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time. It’s the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. And this compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. But this creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.”
Truth is, I read that passage seven years ago.
But it wasn’t until recently that I started applying it.
And it turns out, he was right.
On the remote control of life, rewind and fast forward aren’t the only buttons worth pressing.

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 
A work is not achieved by creating a hermetic space sealed off from the world, but nel mezzo, in the middle of everything,” from The Three Marriages.

Culture, Humanity & Society 
“You couldn’t get laundry detergent, but you could get your brain washed,” from The Museum of Communism.

Identity, Self & Soul 
“People like the idea of believing in something and like to think of themselves as the type of people who hold that belief,” from a book on reverse evangelism.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 
“You’re grabbing a bucket when you should be grabbing a bathing suit,” from Gangster Squad.

Meaning, Mystery & Being 
“Do you have an articulate philosophy of life that locates your being in the larger universe?” from Flourishing.

Media, Technology & Design 
“We love finding unexpected ways to help good information travel,” from Gaping Void.

Nature, Health & Science 
“Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their understanding, these words are meant as conveniences until real understanding can be found,” from God’s Debris.

People, Relationships & Love “We can’t find love by searching for it, it comes to us unbidden, when we give it to others,” from Daily Om.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling
“When you share a goal publicly, your brain enjoys the sharing in the same way it enjoys the achievement itself, and you’ve lost some of your motivation,” from Donald Miller.

Success, Life & Career“Nobody gives you shit. Anything you want in this life, you build it,” from Runner Runner.

Work, Business & Organizations“We’re left paying for a cold corpse that used to be a welcome experience,” from The Death of Customer Service.

See you next week!

A friend of mine just called it quits with her longtime boyfriend.
She said they broke up because of an interpersonal imbalance. A poor division of relational labor, to use her term.
Turns out, after four years of being the girlfriend and the therapist and the babysitter andthe parent, she had nothing left. One individual, carrying the entirety of the relationship load, making a career out of catering to someone else’s frailty.
Not a sustainable system.
I’ll never forget what she told me:
“I felt like I was everything––except my own person.”
Ugh. No wonder she ended it.
When someone exists solely as an extension of another person’s will, as a prop in their personal play, a spare part to support their fragile self, they’re just another object to be manipulated.
Why would they stick around?

Losing your virginity isn’t about sex and it isn’t about loss.
The larger story is about a person of any age, inexperienced and uninformed, who uncovers a stepping stone to a new level of awareness and maturity about himself and the world in which he lives.
When I landed my first job as an adult, I lost my professional virginity.
But looking back, that experience was less about the doing the work and more about getting something out of my system and proving to myself that I could do it and becoming confident with who I was and knowing that if I did it once, I could do it again.
It’s a beautiful thing why not try here. A rite of passage. A healthy human milestone.
And while it may be the end of the innocence, it’s also the beginning of opportunity.

Storytelling isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

Narrative is our basic tool for making sense of the world, the currency of human contact, the fundamental instrument of thought and the foundation that psychologically sustains our species.
And yet, in the past few years, social scientists keep reporting that human attention span has declined to a mere nine seconds.
Really?
Tell that to the millions of viewers who watched thirteen episodes of House of Cards in a single day. Tell that to the legions of listeners who made Adam Carolla’s eight hour audiobook, Not Taco Bell Material, the top selling album of the year. Tell that to Kevin Smith’s global fan base, who tuned into Twitterfor his twenty-four hour question and answer marathon.
Perhaps time is an irrelevant construct.
Perhaps when we tell stories, we should be less interested in how much time we have, and more interested in taking people on a tour of our heads and hearts, sharing crumb by crumb and clue by clue the universal human experiences and great sweeps of change that convinced us to believe what we believe, so that by the time we get to the end of the story, the story that we paid for and earned the right to tell, the audience is already nodding and yessing and laughing so much that they’re intellectually and emotional satisfied and can’t imagine another final action beyond where we’ve taken them.
It all depends.
Do you want to give people an answer that checks their box, or engage them with a narrative that wins them over?

My grandfather has a knack for making artifacts.

When he was a kid growing up in the thirties, he found a poem crumbled up in his father’s roll top desk. The passage talked about how to live a good life, be a person of character, stuff like that.
But since the poem had such an impact on his life, he kept it for the next fifteen years. And when he started a family of his own, he turned that anonymous piece of writing into a bronze plaque for all of his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Eighty years later, that poem still spurs conversations in each of our homes. We not only show it to everybody, we tell them the story behind it. We have conversations around the ideas in the poem. And we think about how they apply to our lives today.
That’s our artifact.
What’s yours?
The word itself means, “a skillfully made object.”
But it’s more than that. An artifact is a strategically made social object, too.
Something people can come back to. Something that’s a currency for conversation and collaboration. Something that sets the standard for everyone around you. Something that becomes a canvas for sharing ideas and making observations and asking questions. Something that serves as a platform for expanding people’s abilities. Something that reflects your brand’s human purpose. Something that holds up a mirror that demands people look at themselves.
Want to create one for your organization? Consider these ideas:
Artifacts start with a story. Or a process. Or a system. Or a framework. What’s your unique approach to solving problems or telling stories or building technology or doing business? That’s the content of your artifact.
Artifacts continue with a structure. Make your story visually compelling. Simple enough that an audience could digest it on their own, but provocative enough that they would seek you out to learn more.
Artifacts extend with stuff. It’s not an artifact if you can’t hold in your hands and smell it and touch it and share it. People are yearning for texture. No memorialization, no mesmerization. Pixels are fine, but tactile is divine.
Artifacts perpetuate with social. The goal is to create a verbal incident. It’s not about the artifact, but the conversation around it. It’s a sharing device that allows people to connect with each other.
Looking back, my grandfather was right.
Artifacts matter.
They signal the collective spirit of a culture. They help create an environment worth passing on. And they engage the people living and breathing in that world, day in and day out.
And there isn’t a team, company, department, brand or organization in this world that couldn’t be producing and promoting their own.

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 “People fall in love with the merchandise first, then the art behind it,” from the recently released and fascinating Calvin & Hobbes documentary, Dear Mr. Waterson.
Culture, Humanity & Society “No, I’m not going to rush your fraternity,” from the Francis Pedraza article about standing up to the digital cool kids.
Identity, Self & Soul “You let go of the dream you killed yourself for,” from John Moffitt’s story about walking away from that which defined him.
Lyrics, Poetry & Passages “Drop what you’re doing right now and entertain me,” from the new 37Signals book, Remote, about mobile workforces.
Meaning, Mystery & Being “Understanding with your life is fully believing what you understand, but also finding yourself incapable of disbelieving it,” from Psychology Today.
Media, Technology & Design “Focused and oblivious to their surroundings, these people unknowingly made the decision to live in new kind of loneliness,” from PSFK.
Nature, Health & Science “In science, you are studying truth and have to prove everything,” from the obituary of Nobel Prize Winner, Frederick Sanger.
People, Relationships & Love “When they vet people, they need to see more than twinkles, they need sparks,” from the handsome and inspiring Pharrell.
Psychology, Thinking & Feeling“Generate positive emotions on your own without support from the environment,” from Martin Seligman’s new book, Flourishing.
Success, Life & Career“Don’t let the bad guys find a narrow opening and bring you down for trivial reasons,” from the Tom Peters blog.
Work, Business & Organizations“Your management style makes me focus all of my energy on staying out of trouble,” from Dilbert.

See you next week!