Dear my generation:   What gives? Where did all the love go? Are we too pragmatic, too jaded? Or are we more aware of the real workings of the world? How can we possibly reconcile the romantic tales still embodied in our media but absent from our lives? Are we...

I’ve received a few requests for this post, so here it is: my approach to focus. It is not an end-all be-all solution for everybody, but rather a look at the key underlying ways you can keep yourself moving towards a task. The tricks here should work well for anybody,...

Malcolm Gladwell uses the term “Outliers” to describe people who are exceptional in some way. His point is well made, but at the end of the day we tend to forget that outliers are people who are different. Strange. Weird.     To have unusual success, you need to be...

How many times have you put off starting something? How many times did that same task end up being relatively easy, once you finally got started?   In chemistry, activation energy is the “minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction.” What is fascinating about the concept is that this...

A while back, I made the statement that spontaneity is wanting what you get. Recently I had another adventure which has caused me to append to this statement: spontaneity is also knowing how to spot an opportunity.   Too often, we are paralyzed by the fear of the unknown. When...

I love a good debate, but it has been a while since I have had the opportunity to flex my “verbal discussion” muscles. Last night, an Australian friend and I got into a heated debate about the places of art and science in the worldwide educational system. She felt that...

I have said that it is a boon to productivity to be too busy but did not address one key aspect: why?   One of the biggest reasons is also the most simple: if you produce too much, you can cherry-pick the quality items. In photography, for example, you have...

As a mobile app developer, I spend a lot of time consulting companies with regards to why they should or should not (mostly should not) create a mobile application. Too often I see internet retailers and other brands with essentially no web presence or anything to offer wanting to jump...

Having been trained and worked in the field of video games, I am accustomed to the attitude that the media takes towards them. They are frequently portrayed as destroying the morals of society and corrupting our youth, the Rockstar Games of the world made out to be the arms and...

For many years now, US citizenship has conveyed a rather dubious reputation on travelers.  More than a few of us have taken steps to avoid this… sometimes going so far as to sew a Canadian flag on our backpacks.  There was a time that I, like many travelers from the...