Blog Posts

Q: “How can one make the best of one’s life?”

A: "By converting as wide a range of experience into conscious thought." - novelist Andre Malraux Talk about succinct! Malraux captures the theme of The Lifelong Activist in two sentences. And he's not even the first smart French novelist to do so: "regular and orderly in your life like a ...

How Not to Codger

I’m at the age (almost 50!) when many people start to codger, i.e., turn into someone with fixed ideas and narrowed perceptions. A lot of people do it earlier, and some people never do it, remaining youthful until they drop. I’m hoping for that last outcome, and I think I’ll ...

My War on Housework Continues…

As I always suspected: "LONDON (Reuters) - Housework might be bad for your health, according to a study suggesting that tidying up as little as once a week with common cleaning sprays and air fresheners could raise the risk of asthma in adults... "Exposure to such cleaning materials even just ...

Heroes: Randy Pausch

Recently, I have been very inspired by a video of “last lecture” given by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Last Lectures typically involve a retiring professor who condenses his or her decades of accumulated wisdom and experience into one final blockbuster talk, but this one is different because the ...

“Countdown Clock” May be Scary, but It Can Also Keep You Focused

Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly writes here about the "countdown clock" he created on his computer to remind him of how much (or, more to the point, how little) time he has left on the planet and that he shouldn't waste any. He's 55 years old, he says, so anticipates ...

Salon.com reviews The Lifelong Activist

From Cary Tennis, Salon.com's advice columnist : "Anyway, that sort of reminds me about how hard it is to make social change when many of us feel unrepresented by the major political parties, do not belong to labor unions and must figure out for ourselves how to make activism a ...

NYT Publishes My Letter to the Editor on Balancing Work/Home Life

Written in response to this article about how women struggle to balance their spouse/parent/household manager/career roles. A lot of my students and coaching clients (and not just the women) are in this predicament. They blame themselves for being underachievers, when what they should be doing is congratulating themselves on their ...

Oh, So It’s Called “Time Poverty”

The act of naming something is incredibly powerful, since naming not only defines a phenomenon but can render it visible. Think how hard it would be to fight for justice if we didn't have the words "racism" and "sexism" in our vocabulary, and the corresponding concepts as part of our ...

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