Learn to be less precious about your work
We are a culture obsessed with success. We love reading about people who have accumulated ungodly amounts of money and power. We binge podcasts and videos that promise to teach us how to build passive income empires.
You can make a great living writing about the secrets of success to a credulous audience.
But success is boring.
In the opening of his masterpiece Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy writes:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The same is true of success. Every successful person, every business success is the same. …
Alternative forms of meditation for when you can’t focus on your breath one moment longer
You’ve heard all about the benefits of meditation. You know the science behind the benefits of meditation is overwhelmingly positive. You even know that meditation has gone from an ancient sacred religious practice to a fringe hippie belief and then to a billion-dollar industry over the past sixty years.
But what do you do if you can’t meditate? What if you can’t stand focusing on your breath?
Despite the fact that there are countless apps, podcasts, YouTube channels, and articles designed to teach you how to meditate, many of us struggle to find any peace from the practice.
Not All Meditation is the Same
In the…
What story will your customers tell about why they buy from you?
Marketing gurus love to blab about the importance of story. You can pay a lot of money to learn how to use story in sales emails that will make you truckloads of cash.
The marketing gurus aren’t wrong — story does help you sell — but the gurus are missing something.
Emotional Stories
The only way humans communicate anything of importance is through story. We are wired for stories because we are emotional beings. A story helps us remember important stuff because, unlike a grocery list or a spreadsheet, a story triggers an emotional response. …
When the cast of Friends negotiated as a group they saved their show
The recent Friends reunion on HBO Max has put one of the most popular sitcoms of all time back in the spotlight 17 years after the show’s final episode.
While the special itself was a fun, shallow bit of nostalgia for the cast, creators, and Gen X and older Millennial viewers, the coverage around the special has been far more interesting. Many talented writers have explored what the homophobia and whiteness of Friends mean for our culture today.
But missing from the current Friends discourse has been any discussion of one of the show’s greatest creative secrets.
One of the…
A crazy theory of achieving success by setting limits and taking time to enjoy your life
It was a typical Las Vegas August evening. The desert was still awash in sunlight, but the temperatures had begun to fall from an afternoon high of 110 degrees Fahrenheit to just above 90.
In one of the nicer neighborhoods in suburban Henderson, the kind where the homes manage to have lush front lawns instead of rock gardens, a man in his mid-50s and his new, late-20s son-in-law stood over the open hood of a well-traveled Honda Accord.
The father-in-law was lecturing the younger man on the virtues of changing your own oil.
“Paying for an oil change is a…
Jason McBride
Poet. Storyteller. Indie Comic Creator. I create poetry comics, graphic novels, and zines. he/him https://weirdopoetry.com/
