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How Students Taught Me the Best Strategy for Changing the Game
It was 1973 and I was sitting in the faculty lounge at a New England boarding school listening to the veteran teachers bemoan the state of “students today.” The consensus seemed to be that students were unmotivated, unengaged, poorly prepared, and lazy. “They never speak up in class and just sit there like bumps on…
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The Art of Yak Shaving Revisited
A while ago, my son Teague introduced me to the concept of “yak shaving.” If you do a web search you get a few definitions which are variations on a theme. They boil down to something like “activities you find yourself doing which appear unrelated to the objective you started out with but which, in fact, are…
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Five Steps to Meaningful Giving: Maybe It’s Time To Channel Your Inner Scrooge
The character, Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is the epitome of the cranky miser, but as my father liked to point out, there are really two Scrooges, the lonely unhappy man at the beginning of the story and the happy generous one at the end. There is a little Scrooge in all of us,…
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Being Smart About Being Smart: Invite Others Into a Shared Thought Process
Arne Lewis, was my Art History professor and advisor. He combined a soft-spoken style with an intense curiosity about how people learn. I still remember his critique of my draft of my first chapter of what would be a hundred-page senior thesis. “There are a lot of provocative ideas here,” he said, “but I am…
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A Secret to Special Relationships – Cultivating Ordinary Time
A grandpa and his grand-daughter are walking to school. He is here for a few weeks and it’s a morning ritual. She runs ahead to pick up a crimson sweet gum leaf and comes back to deposit it in his hand. He is the explorer’s bank, the archive. He appreciates with interest. She is walking…
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Time You Made the Move to a Mac? What I Learned in the First Two Weeks
I finally have made the move from my PC desktop to a MacBook Air. I have been primarily using MSDOS and Windows PCs since the beginning (and CPM machines before that), so let’s just say “a long time.” I have even enjoyed customizing and repairing them on occasion. I have a sizeable knowledge investment in PCs,…
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Three Secrets to Becoming Your Own Tech Support – Your Children Will Thank You
According to family legend, my great-uncle Edwin said before he got into his first car, “Anyone who can drive a horse and buggy can certainly drive a car.” At which point, he got behind the wheel, put the car in gear and drove across the front lawn through the neighbor’s picket fence and finally came…
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Three Keys to the Successful Launch of a New Employee that I Learned Baling Hay
Mr. Lemmel was my first manager. I was a suburban kid working as a farm hand for the summer. On my first day, he needed me to help bale hay. He drove a tractor over to his gas pump to fill up the tank for the day. Then he told me to sit in the…
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Confronting the Near Enemy: Is One Emotion Masquerading as Another?
One of the reasons I like reading fiction is that every now and then, an author will sneak a wonderful bit of wisdom into a story that grabs me in a way that is much more memorable than if I had read it in a textbook or journal article. Usually when I discover such a passage,…
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What Am I Missing Here? Five Ways to Make the Invisible Visible
Have you ever been in a meeting where, based on what you see and hear, you expect the meeting to be playing out in one way but instead it is going in another direction entirely? You suspect something is going on beneath the surface and that you are missing something important that would make sense of…