But we don’t need to feel the weight of all existence bearing down on us. We don’t owe the past, and the future is uncertain. We only know history to the extent that it is meaningful to us now. And we only know the future as a set of possibilities determined in some small, unpredictable (albeit significant) part by what we do in the moment.
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On Leadership and the Liberal Arts
Among the greatest contributions of Plato was his recognition that the training of true leaders requires a broad rather than narrow and strictly practical education. Plato’s ‘Academy,’ which some consider the first European University, was founded with the understanding that a narrow course of study with a focus on politics alone creates opportunists and demagogues…
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In Praise of Turmeric
The more I age, the more I think about aging. And with age I am changing my view of health. When I was younger, I thought about health in terms of how good I looked and how much I could lift. Now I am thinking more about health in terms of how well I can…
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Is Facebook making us more adventurous?
When was the last time you heard someone say “get off of Facebook (or Instagram? or twitter, or …) and DO something!”? I have a favorite passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This…
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The Politics of Oversharing: The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Circle by Dave Eggers tells the story of a young woman working to navigate a fictional google-type corporation with its sights set on achieving universal surveillance. What the company hopes to achieve is a panopticon vision of society in which no one has any secrets from anyone else. Everything that everyone does is recorded,…
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3 strategies for dealing with public speaking anxiety: Lessons from a pro athlete
Fans often ask my wife, pro equestrian Elisa Wallace, if she still gets nervous. Her answer is always: yes. Even at the highest levels of equestrian competition, it is not uncommon for athletes to involuntarily evacuate the contents of their stomach before an event. With pressure coming from large numbers of spectators (in person and…
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Three business lessons I learned from my father
My father is retiring today. My father is leaving his working life as I feel that mine is getting started. It seems fitting, then, to use may father’s retirement as an occasion to look back at the lessons he has taught me over the years, and that continue to shape how I approach business and…
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