Obviously gift cards are very much on my mind these days. I posted this as a discussion on the Gift Cards Group on LinkedIn, and thought I’d cross-post it here. Any ideas?
Spotting a gift card for the Stanford University stores last night in a local (Palo Alto) supermarket, I wondered about the feasibility of gift […]
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Demanding credit and recognition is a loser’s game… It is a way of saying that we don’t believe good work should be done for its own sake, but rather for the applause that goes with it.
The real kicker is that people who demand recognition never get enough of it.
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Excellent piece by my friend Michael Jennings on how the ubiquitousness of mobile phones is changing Africa - and the utter ignorance of this on the part of people who, somehow, have credibility and are considered experts in how poor brown people suffer. It’s a positive story, with some infuriating points:
[A]bout three years ago I […]
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Pretty much every time I have been chronically unhappy, it was because I was convinced somebody else was “making” me that way. Because once you give up control over your own happiness, you’re just blowing with the wind, influenced by other people’s actions and moods.
Plus, you can start to stubbornly cling to your anger […]
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1. Love
2. People
3. Time
4. Thanks
So, what are yours?
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Several months ago, I quit sugar and wheat flour. This has been one of the best choices I’ve made, for mental reasons as much as for physical ones; I don’t have to put all that effort into attempting to be moderate (I failed most of the time, anyway). Eating a cookie or a piece of […]
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Just over a month ago, I wrote a post on Twitter, Foursquare, and mobile coupons while I was in Hawaii. For a simple guide to Foursquare, check out the Chicago Tribune’s piece published today, which echoes my post in positing that the money-making potential for this app could be huge.
As soon as I left Hawaii […]
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What a fabulous day: no alarm clock, a few hours of baking and cooking, and then dinner with Chris Yeh’s lovely family. It was a bit United Nations around the table: Chinese, Puerto Rican, and Polish, which made for a diverse spread, including Puerto Rican turkey, fried plantains, rice and beans, and traditional American Thanksgiving […]
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Those who know us less well require constant reassurance but those who understand our lives know that life ebbs and flows and let us be without taking offence or feeling ignored etc. The rest, I am afraid, really does not matter.
Shefaly Yogendra, longtime commenter here and one of the nicest minds I’ve met online, left […]
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One of my prized possessions is a drawing Hugh MacLeod did for me, based on what I was saying to him while he drew it. The man is a genius with one of the best hearts I know.
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I’ve been really bad about keeping up on correspondence with people for the last, oh, month or two. So I’m going to tread carefully and update a bit about what’s going on in my world. (I have revised my rules about what I disclose about my personal life online - hence much less specific talk […]
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Gwen Bell:
You get to make happiness happen. To rely on someone else to “make” you “happy” is to live in a state of illusion.
You can add frustration, misery, and powerlessness to illusion.
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We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.
-William Hazlitt (via my friend Gretchen Rubin’s superb Happiness Project, the book of which will be out any day now - order it here!)
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Last night, I was thinking about the most recent surrogate mother to swoop into my life just when I needed one. (By “surrogate mother” I mean a woman who does one or more of the things a biological mother would do with and for me.) I considered just how many of them I have and […]
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