No balance, no bravery — I like men. I like being around men, and married one. I’m raising one. Men are fun! But book lists of all bros are no bueno. There is a masculine monopoly in curated content: in habits and advice, life lessons and leadership. …

Fear is powerlessness in disguise — Confession from an eighties kid: I loved He-Man. I also loved Thundercats — mostly for the opening music — and while I never had any G.I. Joes, I loved them for their articulated arms and legs. But He-Man had the best catchphrase: “I have the power!” Yesterday, I learned something…

Don’t fret the niche — become more and more yourself — You’ve heard Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It’s been extensively sampled in pop music during the last few decades, which is remarkable for a composition that fell out of favor for its first 250 years. While most of his other works disappeared, you’ve heard Pachelbel’s Canon sampled, you’ve heard it at…

Lessons from adaptive sport — We’ve all made assumptions. We don’t realize we’ve done it — we assume we haven’t assumed. And if you’ve seen the classic movie “The Bad News Bears,” you remember Walter Matthau’s character, Morris Buttermaker, and his cautionary message about assumptions. (for the young ‘uns out there: when you assume, you…

It’s not every day you descend into the earth — The first thing they teach you is this: don’t panic. If you can get in, you can get back out. It’s un-reassuringly reassuring. It suggests there might be a reason to panic, and so of course it does wonders for my mild claustrophobia (the truly claustrophobic people don’t sign up…

Sometimes an apology is the least effective thing you can offer — There’s a classic scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” that goes like this: Sir Lancelot receives a message about a princess in distress, and he sets off to rescue her. And, since this is a very silly place, chaos ensues when he stumbles into a wedding party along…

Say “no” to vanity metrics — Twenty-five thousand three hundred seventy-four. That’s my published word count on Medium in my first 33 days. If each word were a foot, then counting unpublished drafts I stacked up a Mount Everest of words from February to March. …