Love Your Work

There’s something I want to talk about, but frankly, I’m a little embarrassed to do so. However, I write with my former self in mind, and my former self would want to know about this. So here I go. I want to talk about how to be somebody. What do...

Systems save energy. Especially if the system helps you with something you do every day. This is why I have a system for cooking. When you’re hungry, you make bad decisions, such as grabbing the quickest food you can find – which often happens to...

Many people think our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and miserable lives. In fact, that’s what most anthropologists thought. Until the 1960s, when they looked more closely at how foragers got by. The way foragers “worked” can tell us a...

There’s a story I think of every time I’m in the throes of a difficult project. It’s from the movie, Catch Me if You Can, about the infamous con artist, Frank Abignale, Jr. Frank’s Father, Frank Senior, tells him a : Two little mice fell in a...

When Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he designed and built his own scaffolding. But, it only covered half of the ceiling. So he painted the first half of the ceiling, then removed the scaffolding. When he finally got to view his...

On October 10th, 1901 – 120 years ago, almost to the day – the grandstand was full at the horse track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. But not to see horses. There was a parade of more than 100 of these new things called automobiles, and several...

Leonardo da Vinci is easily the most-accomplished procrastinator who ever lived. He finished hardly any projects at all. He was great at many things, but he wasn’t great at shipping. The world would have been better off if Leonardo da Vinci had...

When Vincent van Gogh began his career as an artist, he had already failed at everything else. He even got fired from his own family’s business in the process. Not seeing any alternative, he completely immersed himself in art. In one two-week...

1920s, London. Radclyffe Hall was pacing around her study. She wore close-cropped hair, a tweed skirt, and a man’s silk smoking jacket and tie. Her partner, Uma Troubridge, sat in a nearby chair, reading the writing of Radclyffe – or...

It’s 1997, and Tiger Woods is in a sudden death playoff, against Tom Lehman. Lehman shoots first, on a par three, and hits his ball into the water. Now Tiger’s up, and this is Tiger’s tournament to lose. All he has to do is hit a safe shot, far...