ALL EPISODES

 I found myself reading an autobiography of Benjamin Franklin recently. Now, I love biographies, especially autobiographies. It makes me feel like I've had an opportunity and A small way to live another person's life. And in a metaphorical way, I aspire to be able to say someday that I've lived a thousand lives.

Porcupines seem to be a good example of this. Porcupines, to my knowledge, are not terribly aggressive animals. There are not very many predators willing to try to take them on. If a porcupine did have to face a predator, I don't think the porcupine would win very often. But the cost to any predator wanting to eat it is not going to be cheap.

Not crossing the road until the crossing light says go. Doesn't always benefit the individual, but it does make for a more predictable world that everyone else can rely on. I've had enough close calls with Jay Walkers that I think there may actually be some benefit to that one. Now in the United States and more broadly throughout Western civilization, we value independence above most things, and it seems to work well enough, but the concept that one should strive towards maki

We become afraid to try things unless we think we can do it perfectly the first time. And it isn't even the parent's fault half the time because we put this pressure on ourselves just as much as anyone else.  One of my children tends to panic really easily if something doesn't go right, or they mess something up.

So, I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart. And just a warning, there are some religious themes in this, not because this is intended to be a necessarily a religious podcast, but you know, religion is part of my life. And so I discuss it a fair amount in here. Anyways, the thing I want to talk about is, is Beliefs, you know, there's been a lot of times in my life when something I believed was challenged leaving me uncomfortable, the very possibility of chall

I hate the sensation of falling. I've never gone skydiving, and I have absolutely no interest in trying it. When I was young, I remember pleading with my parents not to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. because of the very brief moment in the ride where you drop down a steep slide. I may have been like 10 feet down, and it was still on an angle, but it scared me to death. Regardless, I was made to go on the rides with the rest of the family. It's not l

Sometimes the easiest way to figure out the things that  you should be doing is to figure out the things you shouldn't be doing. For some reason, it's a lot easier for our little minds to focus on things that we don't like. So I put together a list of 10 ways to be a disappointment to someone to help narrow down our options. I focus more specifically on. How to be a disappointment to your friends and family. So, by no means is this list conclusive, but at the very least, I

Almost my entire childhood, I was indoctrinated by school propaganda and child programming into thinking that to be valuable in society, you had to be a good leader. We were told that we were all leaders and that we needed to lead the people around us. We were pumped up with motivational stories and told how special we were, but if everyone is meant to grow up to be a leader. Then who's going to be left to follow?

Journaling is less so a process of writing and more so a very active way of thinking. At the end, you have a very coherent, thought out piece of writing that has just organized your thoughts internally as well. I don't know that we are really capable of thinking without bouncing our thoughts off of other people. Without other people to balance out our views, we can really spiral into crazy. But writing has the magical effect of allowing us to see our own thoughts as an out