Emily Dickinson said it way before Selena Gomez did. In her 1862 letter to her friend Mary Bowles, Dickinson wrote “The heart wants what it wants —or else it does not care.” It could also be argued, the same is true for the stomach. In her 2023 memoir, Barbra Streisand...

Yes, I have a new archenemy—more on that in a moment—but during my daily hikes with Vlad, I’ve been trying to focus on other things instead. One of them is a curious sign—one I somehow missed the first time we encountered it, though fortunately, without any dire consequences. It’s found before o...

Somehow the moment was both intensely moving…and a little creepy. Before some major project launches this Spring, I’ve been skimming through notes from various trainings I’ve taken, focusing mostly on branding and strategy. At one point I uploaded some course transcripts into ChatGPT, hopin...

Granted, my ideas for it tended toward the traditional, even the tame. Soon after, he found his own way to celebrate the occasion (more on that soon). Anyway, I thought Vlad would enjoy celebrating his 4th birthday todaywith his cousins—my sister’s two six-month-old pups. They all get along famous...

It wasn’t the kind of parting line you’d expect from an ex-Marine who served in Iraq. As with many good jokes, some context is required. I’ve been batting 1000 these days, at least when it comes to hiring Taskrabbits. First, Vladimir, an extraordinary packer, and now Eric, a young veteran I hired ...

Even though at this very moment, right outside my window, there’s snow falling on a grove of other trees, I’m still moved by the recent loss of my own largest tree. (I wrote about it two weeks ago HERE.) Knowing that its descendants are scattered from Brooklyn to Maine helps a lot, too. Indeed, this experi...

The source of the quote may surprise you: This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it. It’s from Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), uttered during a pivotal scene when he, a former bank clerk turned serial seducer and murdere...

There’s perhaps some irony that—even though I’ve chosen it for this month’s theme HERE and despite having several clients who are experts and teachers of the craft— I’ve never actually taken a single class or workshop. I can justify this since—for better or worse—it’s been ...

It wasn’t the only reason I chose him. After all, he had completed 461 tasks and, based on 281 reviews, possessed a perfect 5.0 rating. Nonetheless, I admit that one of the more whimsical reasons I hired this particular Taskrabbit to help organize my own Fresh Start (the them...