A First Draft on Life
I always thought of Bon Jovi as a hard rock band, filed in roughly the same part of my brain as Def Leppard. Long hair. Loud guitars. Songs about young men overcoming something together and winning. The key song was always “Livin’ on a Prayer.” It was an anthem of my childhood, and it remains […]
It was 9:30 on a Friday morning when I got a text. The Knicks watch parties were going on sale at 10, one at Wollman Rink and one at Radio City Music Hall. The one inside the Garden had sold out a couple minutes after it went on sale. Game 5 was in San Antonio, […]
About a month before my son graduated from preschool, I was walking through the park, thinking about the last walk that I would take. I wanted to really experience it, because it would be the last morning walk through the park. I wouldn’t have this opportunity to drop him off and have this nice walk […]
Walking around Yale’s Old Campus in the late 1990s, I got an idea stuck in my head that wouldn’t leave for decades. I’m exceptional. Everyone at Yale is exceptional. There’s a line they used to tell us in some form or another, “You can graduate from Yale and become a garbage man, but you’d better […]
I have always liked art that made me laugh. For years my favorite art joke was René Magritte’s pipe, the painting of a perfectly ordinary pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” written underneath. This is not a pipe. And of course it is not. It is a painting of a pipe. You […]
I played weekend soccer in elementary school. Though I was far from the best player on the team, I was the fastest kid on the field. That meant I’d sometimes end up on a breakaway, with the ball at my feet and no defenders ahead of me. When that happened, I’d fall down. I’d literally […]
On the value of trading things you can’t buy. I was flying out to California last week for the Collaborative Gain conference and ended up next to a guy who was actually reading. He wasn’t scrolling or multitasking. He was on a Kindle, deep in his book, and stayed that way for a long time. […]
David Allen wrote Getting Things Done in 2001 and became a kind of secular priest for ambitious, overwhelmed professionals. His central claim was almost absurdly simple. Get things out of your head and write them down. He wasn’t just pitching better organization. He was promising you’d feel calmer, think more clearly, and be more present […]
There’s this thing that happens on crowded sidewalks in New York. Two people are walking toward each other in a rush, both trying to navigate around the other. One steps left, the other steps left. One corrects right, the other corrects right. And suddenly you’re doing this little dance with a stranger, each of you […]
“What were you most excited about when you thought about coming to New York?” I asked. “The snow,” she said. “Growing up in Singapore, I’d always see movies of the snow, but I’d never seen it in person. Tbe snow is always this beautiful white blanket that comes out and coats everything.” “What disappointed you […]