Behavior Change
What Happened When I Stopped Watching The News
I have a secret. One I prefer stay mine, but I need to tell you the secret in order to make another point. So here we go. My secret is: I don’t watch the news. I don’t read the news, I don’t watch it, I’m off Twitter, I cannot tell you who did what where, (…)
Time To Think
It started as an ordinary discussion of books and life, but ended (naturally) with a fight about Emily Dickinson. Not the Dickinson you remember from high school, the one on Apple TV (featuring Wiz Khalifa as death and John Mulaney as Thoreau. I KNOW RIGHT.). In the show, teenage Emily refuses to participate in household (…)
Hold The Vision
There are two parallel universes emerging right now. One living in and with a pandemic and one merely annoyed by it. Day after day I get messages from friends and readers whose lives have been turned upside-down, while their newsfeeds boast of an unaffected population, still going to clubs and birthday parties and vacations to (…)
My Christmas Wish Is A New Emergent Culture
Just skip a week. This is what people suggest when I tell them I’m tired. “Just skip a week, no one will notice.” They tell me to quit writing emails, not cook dinner, don’t go to the gym, leave the laundry on the floor, get a sitter. They say none of you will notice if (…)
Pretension is Optional: What Wine and Writing Have In Common
We were in a cave. They call it a wine cellar, but it was a cave. Parts of it were charming and other parts were super creepy and you could tell that if the walls could talk they’d have had stories because they looked like they’d seen some shit since 1422. The thing I remember (…)
How to Improve When You’re Not “Naturally” Talented
PSA: The Copy Workshop is open for enrollment for our January 2022 session. The workshop is $1,200 but for the next week, Akimbo is offering it for $800 in celebration of something I’ll tell you about later. For now, what you need to know is the price for the workshop will increase in one week. If you’d (…)
How It’s Always Been Done
Each year on the week of Thanksgiving, lawyers and financial planners all over America send me clip art. The clip art comes with a note that says some version of, “We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our clients. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Reese Holdings, LLC.” We’ve created a culture that finds these (…)
How To Reach Someone Who Doesn’t Want To Listen
A topic that has come up a lot in my life lately is “people you can’t reach.” How do you reach someone who doesn’t want to hear what you have to say? How do you *convince* them to see your point of view? How do you help someone change their mind? Open their eyes? Get (…)