Image via Wikipedia It is all a matter of perspective. My typical perspective is that it is hard to give birth to something. My wife knows more than I do about this. She is intimately aware of the discomfort, the sleeplessness, the depression, and the sickness that occurs in the …
A man that I trust and respect once told me that we always go from specific to general in our heads, but we want to go from the general to the specific in our lives. He was speaking about the process of creating something new, but I think it applies …
Image via Wikipedia The easy answer is that we would like to turn something out of nothing. While many of us are not in the entrepreneurial field, that is the one thing that we all quest after. It is the need to turn a problem into a solution using nothing but you …
Image via Wikipedia My grandmother owned a mountain. Well, maybe not the entire mountain, but in the middle of Ohio, it is about the closest thing to a mountain as there is. And near the top of it, my grandfather built a huge farmhouse. He built it in two stages, …
Image via Wikipedia I had never dressed up for Halloween until I became a teacher. It just wasn’t something we did in my family. But, when I became a middle school teacher, it was definitely an expectation. So, I was Peter Pan and Poneyboy a couple of times and it …
Image via Wikipedia I used to tell everyone that I was going to become a teacher. I would tell them that it was the novels that I read in high school that made me first want to do it. I would say that those novels were the ones that I …
Groups seem to be the holy grail of social networks. From Linked-in groups to the new Facebook communities to the millions of people self-organizing in Ning networks, groups have become the default setting for communication and collaboration. When you are in doubt about the effectiveness of your web application, throw …
Image by oskay via Flickr In discussions about change, the expectation is that some things are negotiable and others are not. There is a kind of understood language for those things that are sacred, and therefore off the table. We give them a preferred nomenclature, using words like standards or …
We are never so crass as to boil down a person to a dollar amount. To do that would be to establish the idea that a person could be purchased, rented, or otherwise commodified. And, we don’t do that. Instead, we valuate ideas. We put a price tag on companies …
Image by abbey*christine via Flickr I’m sure that A Christmas Story has been formative for many just as it was for me. I’m also sure that many have thought about the Triple Dog Dares that they have subsequently faced as a result of that iconic line of dialogue. But, I …