Month: April 2025

When one is stuck, the instinct is to look for someone to escape this jam. Rarely do we think to pick ourselves. It is not because we are not capable of doing what needs to be done. It is because there is comfort without having to go it alone. When you pick yourself, there is no one else to blame. You have to take the responsibility, the consequences, and the credit.

What we can do is have enough light to take one step into the dark. Then another. And then another. Pretty soon, you will be on your way.

I don’t know how often I have given this advice to non-profit founders or clients. But there is something about the quiet assurance, “You can do this,” that can be enough to get going. It is incredible what a couple of steps forward can change our whole mindset. You don’t see yourself at one moment as doing what needs to be done, and then the next, you are that person. All that it takes to be an artist is to make art. That’s it. Go.

Indeed, humans love themselves more than any other person in this world. And yet, we care way more about other people’s opinions than our own. Wanting to fit in is a powerful cultural phenomenon with severe impacts. Thousands of years ago, if we were kicked out of the tribe, it could mean death.

Today, however, we are misaligned in that we can find happiness on our own. Happiness is shared. At the end of the day, people are all we have. But there is a reason why we care so much about what others think about us. What’s important is recognizing why and acting accordingly. Does losing this job mean I will be thrown out of my tribe? Probably not.

This idea is to have the courage to say no when there aren’t years of research to support your stance. For most of human history, that is what we have done. We didn’t have studies on parenting or the best way to raise a child. You looked at the landscape, you saw what other parents did, perhaps you had a discussion, but more often than not, you went with a gut feeling.

Recently, I came across this friction point: Do you allow a child to bring a comfort toy to school to deal with anxiety? The answer was an emphatic No. In our circumstances, we believed the best way to parent wasn’t to take a step back. Honestly, it felt like relying on a binki. This is not to shame the other parents who make this choice. Each child is different. And each family dynamic is different. I do think we are at an interesting intersection here. When we keep removing friction points for our children to overcome, when it is time for them to become adults, how will they ever have practiced this?

The opportunity to practice dealing with anxiety is right now. Perhaps the next revolution is for parents to stand up and say, “Enough is enough.”

Scarcity is defined as a relationship one feels about their needs.

For instance, shelter is unnecessary if you have a warm bed to sleep on at night.

But what if the problem is that we have grown an insatiable appetite for more?

It isn’t enough to have a warm bed; now, it must be in a two-story, 5,000-plus-square-foot house overlooking the beach.

The easiest way to begin to unwind this narrative of feeling deficient is to check our list of needs.

When we look around with what we have, it is clear that someone from just 200 years ago (never mind the Pharaohs of old), we have plenty.

Not everyone, of course. But most of us with laptops and internet connections can probably point to enough.

Markets rely on scarcity as the driving force. What would happen if the winds were to change and people realized I had enough?

Before we built this modern economic system, people relied on cooperation. Contrary to popular belief, economic life didn’t emerge from bartering with your neighbor and eventually using some kind of currency to substitute when a cow couldn’t be split two ways. The technology eventually caught up once economic forces were invented. Before, however, gift-giving economies ruled. The community came together and exchanged goods (like potlatch) to ensure the well-being of everyone else. Gift giving is now seen as archaic. We must move forward with “economic progress.” (Insert sarcastic font.)

But these forces continue to take a life of their own—literally. They are ideas that insulate themselves by creating laws to protect them. “The economy” is talked about as a living thing. Corporatism continues to invade our everyday language.

And now we continue to live with both the benefits and the consequences. We create abundant food while upholding a system that can’t distribute it well enough to feed everyone. Wants and needs are now seen together, and as a result, create slaves to the material condition. While many continue to see a path of tear down to build back up, I think of how to evolve.

Modern-day capitalism works exactly as we created it. Pointing the flow of resources for a few leaves the masses wanting more. But, it isn’t enough to say the rich need to pay their fair share. If you were to take all the wealth of the top 1%, you could fund the government for 8 months. That’s it. It goes back to what we will put at the center of our lives. As I get older, I see that we need more than ever dignity. Purpose. Meaning.

We are not here to serve capitalism. Capitalism is here to serve us. I look at my home state, Utah, which was just awarded the best economy in the United States. And my answer is, to enable what? The goal isn’t to win economics. The goal is to live a life we can all be proud of.

/rant

There’s an air in the culture: Why do we see the world as inadequate?

The reason is that we have been conditioned to believe the world owes us something.

This is the wrong framework.

Not because we don’t deserve to have all the pleasures and comforts that modern life offers.

We will be more satisfied with our lives by pursuing what we can contribute instead.

Freedom isn’t the absence of constraints.

Basketball has a court. And what you do in between the lines can be magic.

A painting has obvious constraints when looking at a canvas.

What we do with these boundaries gives us the opportunity to defy logic.

If your project needs unlimited time and money, you’re not being serious about creating something that will delight us.

Freedom might be breaking these confines. However, it can also be found within a system of parameters. 

Not all effort is noticed. Too often, the boss wants to point to results.

What would the culture be like if we decided to flip this? Focus on the process rather than results.

How would that change the projects we pick? The art we make? The chances we take to do something daring?

9 years of showing up daily to put something out in the world to help change people’s minds.

No, this isn’t a popular blog. But it is essential in clarifying my point of view. Making assumptions and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Even if no one reads it, I would do it anyway because…why not?

I’m a writer—an artist. An artist needs a space. And mine is WordPress and a laptop. This is a place to practice. Here is to 3,000+ blogs and to another 3,000.

Chop wood. Carry water. Onward.

Boredom is thought of today as a lack of entertainment. But we are not seeing what the gift it can be.

Initially, the Romans described boredom as “taedium vitae” (weariness of life) and “horror loci” (dread of place). As the years progressed, boredom became shaped by the change of work patterns in the industrial era. Renting our time to an assembly line for money fundamentally changed how we view our time. Because so much of it is leased out to someone else (again, we are not on our time; we are on the bosses), we stress how our time is managed off the clock.

The problem we are having is that we think time should be used efficiently like a scarce market resource, causing more and more stress. Boredom can now be seen as a negative thing when, for thousands of years, having discretionary time was abundant.

Humans don’t have off-and-on switches. As a result, we struggle with the relationship of being on the clock or off it. Sitting around, we can’t help but pick up a phone to fill time; it seems like a better option than nothing. But we are missing an opportunity to discover if we can never sit with our thoughts.

When we leave the room, we eventually fill it with imagination, ideas, conversation, insight, and connection. We can resist the need to fill the space, so much can open up.