• Deliberate Practice

    Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of Psychology at Florida State University, has been a pioneer in researching deliberate practice and what it means. According to Ericsson: People believe that because expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance the expert performer must be endowed with characteristics qualitatively different from those of normal adults. […]…

  • Successful People Balance the Big-Picture with the Details

    One of the biggest challenges in life is balancing the “big picture” with the details. You have to have a macro and a micro view of your life at all times. In life as in film editing, when you’re working on some minor detail, you have to be thinking about how it fits into everything…

  • People Who Believed in Me

    Have you ever had someone say something positive about you to you that stuck with you? Maybe it was a teacher, parent, friend, or stranger who saw something in you and felt so strongly about it they told you about it and in doing so, it changed how you thought about yourself for years if…

  • My Body is a House

    This is a story of how a joke from a 3-year old, a 100-year old house, and a rainy afternoon helped me to move on. Carmina’s Joke “Daddy, there’s a cow in the sunroof,” my 3-year old daughter said to me as we were driving through the country to see my brother and parents for Thanksgiving.…

  • 2017 Year in Review

    O God, Thou sellest all good things to men at the price of effort.” -Leonardo da Vinci This year was about getting re-settled and getting re-situated. The main themes of the year were moving the family to La Crosse, selling the house in Tipton, the ramping up of t-shirt sales, and the ramping down of…

  • 2015 Year in Review

    This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot. Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the…

  • The Only Way Out is Down

    Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if it was more like Minecraft. I wake up alone in the middle of a foreign, undeveloped terrain full of wild animals and scary beasts. My only tools are my fists. I’ve got 12 hours until sunset. Sometimes I fantasize about escaping through tunnels. When I was young…

  • Underutilized Me

    I work 8-5 and do IT support and web design nights and weekends. My wife sells essential oils and makes soap for Skinny Coconut Oil. We have 5 kids. I go to church 2 times a week. I have an hour commute. There’s just not a whole lot going on. I’m underutilized. There are whole…

  • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Weedeating

    I hated to weedeat. I never wanted to do it again. I thought that if I killed the grass, I wouldn’t have to do it again. Every spin of the plastic blades was murder. I wanted the grass to die. And it did. But something worse returned. Bare ground, like power, abhors a vacuum. There is…