Last Sunday I attended an autumn equinox celebration up in the mountains at an outdoor amphitheater outside of Boulder, Colorado. I bring this up because I was married there. Thirty-seven years ago. And I hadn’t been back until that Sunday night. Suddenly, I found myself choked up, hoping to be alone for a few minutes to collect my thoughts. The back story is that I was only 24, three months pregnant, just starting to show through my $25 garage sale wedding dress, optimistic and scared all at once, overlooking the uncertainty of this monumental decision. And now here I was, standing on the same rocks thirty-seven years later. It got me thinking: What do you know that you didn’t know the last time...
There is a great documentary out right now called, Apollo 13 Survival. If you’re not familiar with the story, on April 13, 1970, two days into lift off, an oxygen tank in their service module exploded, leaving three astronauts without most of their oxygen supply, electricity and other vital resources. Basically, the shit hit the fan. Astronaut Jim Lovell’s now famous quote came across the radio to mission control in five words: “Houston, we’ve had a problem”. A problem was putting it mildly as he calmly stated disaster beyond imagination. They were about two days shy of oxygen to get home at their current rate of speed. Together, with the astronauts, mission control worked tirelessly, chain smoking many packs of Pall Mall’s to...
As Labor Day approaches this Monday in the United States, it has me thinking about my own career path, a long circuitous road that began 36 years ago. A fresh graduate out of the School of Business owning exactly two suits and a beater Honda, I accepted a job as a financial analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank, our nations bank. Only about six weeks in, I knew I had to get out of the cubicle that was my prison. I was dying on the vine and I knew it. The hours would drag like months as I poured over the manuals I was to learn in analyzing banks. Yawn. Without warning or another job to go to, I got up, walked down...
Out on the vast plains and mountains of South Africa this past July, you could say I found love again. I was volunteering at a school and the kids studied me. Me studying them with a smile and a wariness, wondering if they would “let me in to their world”. We served a lunch and one by one, they sat on the concrete walkway to eat. I looked over and saw a girl, maybe about ten sitting alone eating her lunch. I went over and said hello. She just looked at me out of the corner of her eye, wary of me as well. Just when I was thinking I should probably walk away and leave her to eat, she patted the concrete next...
Recently, I was out to dinner with a friend who owns a creative retail business. Soon in, she exclaimed how she had hired a marketing firm to do all of her marketing. She went on to say she didn’t want to think about it or deal with the public and how relieved she was. My first question to her was, “do they use AI”? Without missing a beat, she said, “it’s all AI”. Since that night, something didn’t sit right in me and made me downright sad. Now, I know there are many good things to come out of AI as well, such as medical advances. But there is also the founder of AI telling 60 Minutes that he is worried about an...
