My friend Jen compares creativity to making pancakes. Both are processes that require a bunch of attempts, imperfections, and patience. Think about it. No one ever nails the first pancake. You pour the mixture out onto the frying pan and it resembles a Pacman. Or a crescent moon. …

Last year my wife and I traveled through Italy. We swam off the rocks of Riomaggiore, drank wine in the vineyards of Val d’Orcia, and walked our way around the streets of Rome. We also discovered something that ended up being one of my biggest aha moments of 2022. That…

Jen Waldman recently reminded me that goal setting and goal achieving are two different things. The former is all about creating a strategy. The latter is a binary measurement of whether you did something. The former can create habits that last beyond the goal itself. The latter does not. The…

This morning I told my wife I was determined to finish my 2022 reflection and 2023 planning today. Her response: “Haven’t you spent the last 3 days doing that?” Nothing like some direct and honest feedback from a loved one to sort you out. I since realised I was overcomplicating…

Everyone is familiar with a day of “back to backs”. One meeting, after another, followed by another, then another, for hours on end. The day turns into a blur, each meeting becoming indistinguishable from the next. …

A choice we make based on a vision for a better version of the future. It might be your vision or someone else’s vision. Before you say “I’m not a leader”, stop reading this blog and go play chess on the board you impulse purchased after binge-watching Queens Gambit it’s…

Remember the start of 2021 when you set a bunch of goals/intentions/postures/words/resolutions/experiments for the year? One month in, how are they going? What have you observed? Are you creating the conditions you said you wanted? What variables do you need to tweak? Originally published at https://noodlescratchers.com on January 31, 2021.

The confrontingly still relevant Letters from a Stoic has recently become the most dog-eared book in my bookshelf. This is thanks to profound and simple lines like: “ Associate with people who are likely to improve you.” Seneca Bringing it to the present day this has me thinking: who are…

The beauty of a good rabbit hole is that we don’t know what’s at the bottom. Knowing we’re in the dark we’re able to curiously explore a topic staying open to what might be found, remaining unattached to what the end result must look like. We do this particularly well when researching something new on our own. Perhaps it’s “Best Gazebo’s for camping” or “what’s a poet laureate?” So what if we took that same posture, of exploration and curiosity, to our conversations with others? What might we see? What might we learn?