My preconceptions about the elderly went out the window four years ago, when a woman in her early-80s came to me seeking pastoral care. She had been widowed for several years, but her distress didn’t come from the loss of her husband. Instead, it was because she had fallen in love with a married man…

There is a famous quote from Henry Ford about the invention of the automobile: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  Ford’s point was later reinforced by Steve Jobs, who remarked, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they…

Innovation is a top priority for almost every organization. But to achieve success through innovation, companies must put as much energy and investment into marketing new offerings as they do in generating them. The role of marketing in some companies seems to have diminished in recent years, with the growth of artificial intelligence-driven algorithms and…

Happiness expert Paul Dolan, a professor in behavioral science at the London School of Economics, recently released a report saying, among other things, that you will be happier and healthier if you don’t have kids.  Dolan points to women who are single with no kids as the happiest subgroup in modern society.  While his findings…

I turned forty yesterday.  I was born on June 15th in the last year of the 1970s, in North Shore Hospital in Great Neck, New York. Since then, life has generally been good to me—or at least that’s what my optimism tells me as I consider my past and present. I have a beautiful family. …

Theoretically we are free to select the kind of person we love. We might have chosen someone else. We’re not being forced into this by social convention or match-making aunts or dynastic imperatives. But in reality our choice is probably a lot less free than we imagine. Some very real constraints around whom we can…

More often than not, life does not play out in the manner we desire.  For example, we are in a relationship with someone we think will turn out to be “the one,” and then it ends prematurely under negative circumstances.  Or we start a new business with hopes that it will result in us being…

Many of the people I admire lead lives that have a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career, started a family and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb — I’m going to be an entrepreneur, a doctor, a cop. They did the things society encourages us to do,…

Laird Hamilton is a big wave surfer.  He co-created tow-in surfing with Buzzy Kerbox and Dave Kalama in the 1990s. For those unfamiliar with the term, tow-in surfing is when a jet ski or helicopter is used to literally tow a surfer into a wave that would otherwise be too large or in too precarious…

Before Jerry Lorenzo founded his luxury streetwear brand Fear of God, he was a party promoter in Los Angeles. I can relate to that because for a time I was a party promoter in New York.  It is a label I try to avoid, but it follows you.  Even as I am now a father,…