You’re stressed. You’re busy. You have so much on your plate. Time to read? Other than kids books? Get out of here.  Except maybe the latter is the solution to the former. If you want to be less stressed, you gotta make time for yourself—to read, to think, to learn. The great William Osler (a…

After a long and arduous hunt, Theodore Roosevelt finally got the bull caribou he had been tracking. “It was one of those moments,” he later wrote, “that repay the hunter for days of toil and hardship; that is if he needs repayment, and does not find life in the wilderness pleasure enough in itself.” As…

This whole thing can go by so fast. Because you have so much going on. Because you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water. It’s understandable, but if you don’t slow down and wrap your head around this parenting thing, you can end up missing so much that matters.  One way to do…

Marcus Aurelius’s father died when he was young. But then this young boy who was cursed by tragedy received a great gift, a gift that the children who have received it know to be one of the most incredible things in the world: he had a loving stepfather.  Ernest Renan wrote that Marcus was very…

Lyndon Johnson grew up poor. Like, log cabin, almost 19th century poor. He was not, like his future running mate, John F. Kennedy, unaware of the economic crises of his time. He was not sent to the best schools. Yet, he did alright for himself, didn’t he? Except Lyndon had a chip on his shoulder…

Is there anything sadder than a person whose work is their life? They neglect their family, they put in crazy hours, they have no interests, no hobbies outside what they do at the office. Maybe your parents were like this. Perhaps you are like this.  Think of Marcus Aurelius. He had an important job. He…

You don’t need your kid to be a rocket scientist to be special. You don’t need to teach them 15 languages or the cello. It’s not a degree from Harvard or a perfect SAT that’s going to vault them into the elite category—not the elite category that counts.  “You may think this is a small…

They say it all the time.  When will this be over? Are we there yet? Why is this taking so long? Do we have to?  It’s whiney. It’s annoying. You ask them to stop. But in getting upset, you miss the real opportunity. To teach them. To explain to them what they’re really saying. In…

In his Broadway show, Bruce Springsteen—whose songs have often focused on the painful legacy of our parents—explained the choice that all of us have as fathers. “We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives,” he said at the beginning of “Long Time Comin’.” “We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them,…

When Martin Luther King Jr. took over Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, he insisted on a small social shift after his sermons that was immediately noticed. As he mingled with his parishioners on Sundays, he wouldn’t ask them what they were doing, the way previous pastors had. Instead, he looked them in the…