Live with Less Stress & More Fun
If I told you that your life would be better and that you would be healthier and happier if you did something very specific for one hour each day, would you be curious to hear what that one thing is? It’s free and relatively easy to obtain... …
[Read more...] about A Free Ticket to Better Health & Happiness
A while back I was minding my own business at Barnes & Noble when a book called Drops Like Stars by Rob Bell jumped in my hands and held me hostage for an hour. It is a well-designed work of art peppered with wonderfully engaging thoughts on suffering and creativity and life. One of the passages that really grabbed me was a story from the book Art & Fear about a ceramics class. The teacher divided the group in two and announced that one team would be graded on the sheer quantity of the pieces they produced, while the other would be graded solely on the quality of the one thing on which they would work. Amazingly, the group that focused on quantity also ended up creating the piece of the highest quality. …
[Read more...] about The Secret to Getting More Quality Time
The Golden Birthday. The First Kiss. The New Job. The Milestone Anniversary. Life is filled with big deals. The stuff that sweeps us off our feet and the moments we remember forever. We often mark these occasions with greeting cards, because emails and text messages just won't do. But the worst is being stuck without a card and having to make a last-minute trek to find the right one in a rush. Blechh. Talk about a major downer and an epic pain in the butt. Life is busy enough without this extra hassle. …
[Read more...] about Art Collecting Just Got Fun. And Functional.
What's heaven like? I'm sure you asked this of your elders when you were a "little," but have you asked it recently? What do YOU think heaven is like? I absolutely adore my mom's answer to my inquiry when I was five years old. I'll never forget the conversation. She was pushing me on the swing of our trusty backyard swing set. (Boy, being the youngest, that thing had seen some love by the time I came along.) By age five I was a swinging fool. I spent a large fraction of my childhood examining clouds and dreaming on that swaying piece of plastic. The conversation went something like this... …
[Read more...] about How to Create Heavenly Moments In The Here and Now
Have you heard the story about the married couple photographed together at Disney World 15 years before they met? (I found out about it from a link Chris Brogan shared via Twitter.) The couple didn’t know each other, and they didn’t even live in the same country at the time the photograph was taken: That fateful realization came just one week before their wedding eight years ago. Alex and Donna had been going through old family snapshots. There, in the blurry background of a picture of 5-year-old Donna was 3-year-old Alex being pushed down Main Street at the same moment in 1980 by his father. The senior Voutsinas’s distinctive jet-black hair with its white tuft caught his eye. “My mother pulled out albums from the same trip. My dad is wearing exactly the same outfit.” Other pictures from that trip showed Alex on his dad’s shoulders. The boy in the background of Donna’s picture and the boy in those pictures were the same. Weird, huh? …
What's the best gift you can give someone? Gold? Gift Certificates? Ghirardelli? The real answer? TIME. Time has really been on my mind lately because it's such a limited resource. And no one, not even the most acclaimed inventor has figured out a way to create more of it. The other crazy thing about time is that we don't know how much of it we have to work with. Some get 96 years, others get 6. Simply put (as cliche as it sounds): it's priceless. We know this cognitively, but our actions don't reflect this knowledge. …
[Read more...] about The Best Gift Ever (and Why It’s So Hard To Give)
I like driving by our old apartment every now and again. It’s a good reminder to me of the long, winding road Kim and I have traveled and the ridiculous faithfulness of God. It’s funny how once you achieve a certain level of success, in retrospect, the road you took to get there never seems as bumpy. Nowhere is this more evident than in having kids, by the way. The first month with a newborn is rough stuff. No one in their right mind would subject themselves to that again after having just gone through it. But given enough time, the tortuous sleep depravity and foul, sloppy diapers don’t seem nearly as formidable. Eventually, having another kid seems like a fine idea. But I digress. (And no, this in no way should be construed as any sort of “announcement.”) Back to the apartment. …
Chasing after a dream requires a lot of passion, preparation, and persistence. But there's one other "p" word that might be even more important. This episode outlines a crucial strategy you need to be aware of if you want to see your dreams come true. [flv:http://www.kimandjason.dreamhosters.com/clubkj_stuff/relief_brief/003-Dream_Makers.flv 450 338] iPod Version (4.2 MB) …
A few years ago, we had the privilege of interviewing long time Sesame Street cast member Bob McGrath. We had lots to ask him. How did he go from a childhood home with no TV to being a beloved cast member on one of the most popular children’s television shows ever? Who is his favorite Sesame Street character? What has he learned from working with kids? What was it like working with Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch? Bob answered these and more questions, and shared some behind-the-scenes stories from life on Sesame Street. …
[Read more...] about Our Interview with Bob from Sesame Street
In New York, women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business. In Fresno, California, no one may annoy a lizard in a city park. In Elkhart, Indiana, it is illegal for barbers to threaten to cut off kids’ ears. Although impossible to track, there are probably hundreds of thousands of federal, state, and city laws in the United States, with new ones being proposed all the time. That doesn’t count any of the rules enforced by schools and businesses. Interestingly, with all of the laws and rules on the books, the ones we often cling to most fervently are the ones that don’t actually exist. …
[Read more...] about Dumb Laws and the “Rules” of Motherhood
