Over the past few months, I’ve been dealing with a nerve issue in my lower back that’s been pretty brutal at times. After a flare-up in January, I got hit about a month ago with sharp, throbbing pain down my left leg that made simple things like walking, sleeping, or any kind of physical activity a real challenge. Continue reading “My Back Injury”
I’ve been an advisor for startup CEO’s for almost 4 years now. I’m pretty good at it. But, also, I’ve also been training to be a coach.
Coaching vs. Advising
The difference between a coach and an advisor is simple but profound:
An advisor gives advice. They offer answers, frameworks, and examples. They’ve seen the movie before and can tell you what usually happens next. Continue reading “Writing about Coaching”
Every Christmas, my mom gets all the boys a shirt, and they’re great shirts that I wear for years. This Christmas was no different. She got me, my dad, and the boss a great shirt.
I put it on immediately and the next day I put it on again. My sister and I were sitting at lunch at this diner in Minneapolis, and she said, “You should wear that every day.” I said I should. She said “I’ll give you a dollar for every day that you wear it.” which sounded good to me.
But I said, “Well, actually I think I should get accelerators the longer I go to incentivize me to keep going.” She agreed, and we said every ten days the price doubles, and off we went!
Fast forward, I am now on day 13 of wearing this shirt every day.
Kudos to my sister for weaponizing my desire to keep streaks going. If you don’t know this, I love streaks and I have some crazy streaks going.
I’m 1600 days in my water drinking 80 oz every day and thousands of days into using Readwise.
I heard this news lately and found it refreshing. There are so many positives to this time we’re living in.
If you think about government, what is its job? The most important thing government can do is ensure rights, defend our borders, and create a context for prosperity. That word “prosperity” really means a healthy economy. So, let’s look about our economy
Continue reading “The US Economy is Doing Great”
I always enjoy the writings of Tim Urban and love his blog Wait But Why I recently saw a tweet of his where he visualized the life of a typical American. It looks like this:
Continue reading “There’s So Much Time Left”
Coming to this after Milan and Rome
Our trip to Ireland was great. I was surprised how small an dintimate the cities were. I found Dublin incredibly modern and the west coast the opposite. We explores a lot. Some details…. Continue reading “Euro Trip 2024 – Ireland”
(Previous post, the first part of the trip and our time in Milan)
We would spend 4 nights and 3 days in Rome and it was a great time. We saw everything we wanted and more. Continue reading “Euro Trip 2024 – Rome”
The entire family took a spring break trip to Italy and Ireland. The trip was pricey and tiring but we had a fantastic time and made some memories that we’ll remember forever. This post is just the start of our trip.
Given that this was our first real trip as a family, my main goal was for everyone to just have a good time and want to travel more. On that front, it was a huge success. We had no arguments, meltdowns or even disagreements. We had a blast.
It was also huge for the kids. They were able to experience being in another country where they saw new cultures, new languages and people who didn’t look or talk like them. You could tell it was eye-opening. Hunter especially loved it. He said that if there’s one place he wants to live in the world it’s Rome.
On to some day-to-day details. I’m doing this (below) mostly so I remember exactly what we did.
Thursday (24 hours before the trip)
We were supposed to leave Thursday morning but Diane and I went out of breakfast on Wednesday and we discovered that Italy won’t let us in with Diane’s passport as it expires in 74 days. This is news to us. After initially panicking and thinking about cancelling the entire trip, Diane hustled her face off and got to the passport office and managed to get a passport turned around in 24 hours. We pushed our flights back one day and were off on Friday.
Friday
We’re off. It’s a long flight but everyone’s pumped.
We do one flight to JFK and then another red-eye flight to Milan. Continue reading “Euro Trip 2024 – Milan”
I just read the book Atomic Habits and really enjoyed it. Specifically, there was one part that really called out to me and it was about how to accomplish your goals.
As the author James Clear says, there are really mainly 3 ways to change
Continue reading “Changing Identity to Achieve Goals”
We all have things in our past that we frequently remember, good and bad. Some bad memories in my past are events where I’m really embarrassed about my behavior: women I treated poorly, friends I didn’t respect as much as a should, and situations that I let get out of hand to a place where I was uncomfortable. I would do all of them differently now but it’s obviously too late to fix. These events pop up all the time in my head. I relive them, briefly, but regularly.
Imagine a river flowing. This river is my energy as a person. Now imagine a rock in that river. The water moves to go around the rock. It still flows and isn’t blocked much but the flow is somewhat disrupted. Each one of these memories is one of those rocks. These are memories that get me charged up and that charge takes away from me doing other positive things and having positive thoughts.
This past weekend, I undertook an exercise to get rid of those rocks. Continue reading “Getting Rid of Scars”