I Doubt It

There is a pervasive untruth that is foisted upon us early in life and then reinforced at every turn. We hear it when we try-out for sports or take tests to get into school. We hear it when we interview for our first, or second, or twentieth job. We hear it every time we make…

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When Will We Learn?

I watched a very interesting documentary recently. “Lesson Plan” (2011) is about a one-week experiment in a high school class at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, in 1967. The teacher, Ron Jones, decided to answer the question, “How could the people in Germany go along with the holocaust?” in a very unique way.…

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Making Change

This has happened to most of us at least once. You are at a store and you pay for your items with cash. The cashier gives you back your change and you notice that although they owed you $10 and change, they gave you back a twenty and change. What do you do? We all…

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Certainty

How many things are you certain about? I mean absolutely, positively, no doubt about it, certain. If you are like most people, the answer is, “not many.” I used to be certain about most things. I “knew” I was right, and I worked hard to help others see things my way. However, that certainty wasn’t…

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Not Running, But Remembering

I didn’t run the 18th Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon on Sunday, but I did a lot of remembering. I ran the first 17 Memorial Marathons and co-founded the race. Every year as the race approached more and more people would ask me, “are you ready to run?” and every year I would say yes. This…

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We Bought A Sofa

When you raise six kids in a house, things get a little worn. So, when my wife finally decided she wanted a new sofa for the family room I said, “Sure!” Several days of shopping and selecting fabrics (spread over a few weeks) later and the new furniture was on order. The new sofa (two…

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Just The Facts Ma’am

Actually, Jack Webb’s ‘Joe Friday’ character (in the popular 50’s TV series “Dragnet”) typically used the phrase “All we want are the facts, ma’am” (and sometimes “All we know are the facts ma’am”) when questioning women in the course of police investigations. Dragnet was acclaimed for its attention to detail and realistic portrayal of the…

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A Fork In The Road

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. In the poem “The Road Not Taken” (1916), Robert Frost is confronted with two paths in the woods that appear similar, and he chooses to walk down one (maybe the more challenging),…

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I recently read The Mystic In The Machine (The Tao of computation.) I have always been interested in the concept of polarity or duality and the reality that we cannot experience good without the existence of bad, or pleasure without the experience of pain. Our perception of any present reality is the result of previous…

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Systems Thinking

In May 2017, Kenyan runner and Olympic medalist Eliud Kipchoge ran the marathon distance in 2:00:25 on the Formula One track in Monza, Italy. And yes, I stayed up and watched a bunch of guys run 15+ laps around a racetrack for—unfortunately—a little over two hours. I’ll come back to this. I enjoy reading about design—aesthetic…

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