I live in a pretty busy part of Chicago. There’s some dumpsters alongside our building. A consequence of this is that many people seem to think: “if it’s close to the garbage, it’s just like the real thing.” In other words, we seem to collect a bunch of things AROUND the dumpsters, but not actually contained inside where our trusty garbage service can easily move the waste to their trucks.

The result is gross.

There’s constantly broken bottles as I step outside our front door. Extra points because there’s a bunch of dogs and children in the building. Who doesn’t love to play with broken glass?

My wife and I find ourselves cleaning it up. Very. Frequently.

One tremendous day awhile ago someone decided to “throw” out a large glass dining room table. It of course sat outside the dumpster and shattered. Glass everywhere. That took some time to cleanup.

So this last Saturday… I heard...

Anders Conbere made me aware of a video floating around Friday about Mr. Rogers. At first, I was a little nervous about clicking. I sure hope this isn’t comedy using Mr. Rogers’ clips. That guy is too sacred to me.

I’m thrilled I clicked the link.

The video brings up a ton of emotions and thoughts about how creativity and imagination has been so important in my life and where it came from.

I’m sure it’s an equation of both nature and nurture. And I’ve had a whole lot of nurture I’m thankful for.

I’m insanely thankful for the physical and mental tools my parents gave me to play with. My mom worked in microbiology. I had an interest in science. So of course I had your typical chemistry sets you could buy for any kid. But then my mom kicked it up a notch :) Working at a hospital, she brought home fantastical things.

Pipets and pipet guns, dozens and dozens of test tubes and...

Microwaves are only good for making popcorn and baked potatoes.

A friend of mine.

Though I don’t fully agree with my friend’s assessment of the utility of the microwave, I definitely see where he’s coming from.

My wife and I take leftovers home regularly. We are very good about this. It saves money and our waistlines by trying to control those damn portions.

One drawback to leftovers however is reheated french fries.

I might as well save the paper napkins from the restaurant and eat those the next day, if I want to eat something similar to microwaved french fries.

Turning french fries into the texture of a baked potato is definitely not my desired goal.

So I finally tried some advice I feel like I’ve overheard from some conversation on [Reddit](http:/reddit.com).

I think every random piece of news or advice I’ve ‘overheard’ is something I saw on Reddit this week. When, in...

My wife pointed this out to me in Real Simple this weekend.

175 Million
The number of people who flock to zoos and aquariums in the United States each year, as recorded by the Association of, yep, Zoos & Aquariums. A 2009 Animal Science Journal study noted that visitors to zoos left with lower blood pressure and rated their quality of life as improved. So next time the world is driving you wild, go see the lions. They might just tame your stress.

I’m not surprised. One of many things which I have a hard time articulating is how much I’ve enjoyed living near the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. It’s been a terrific party of my life for a bunch of years now.

I’ve been making sure to get 5 miles of walking in a day since January. One of my favorite stops I’ve found is, yep, back to the zoo. Here’s a shot from a few months ago.

If you aren’t an entrepreneur or someone in a creative industry, it’s possible you might not be able to imagine how much disappointment I go through.

I create things constantly. New ideas. New solutions to problems. Some ideas have worked so well people pay for them. Most don’t.

Same with my writing. I put things out there I think might get some momentum on places like Twitter and Facebook. Some go crazy. Most don’t.

I love Bill Murray’s take on this:

Bill: You gotta commit. You’ve gotta go out there and improvise and you’ve gotta be completely unafraid to die. You’ve got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. You’re goin’ out there with just a whisper of an idea. The fear will make you clench up. That’s the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don’t grab and people are going like, “What’s this? I’m not...

I saw something the other day that really impressed me on how a coffee shop near me has stepped up the game of their loyalty program. If you have customers who you’d like to be more loyal, I think we can learn a lot from this.

Your typical loyalty program at a cafe is your average punch card. Buy 10. Get 1 free. Who doesn’t have one these days? They’re all the same. A punch card is a bit of a start into using psychology to help influence customers. Usually companies stop there.

“Do we have a punch card? Check. Let’s hope people keep coming back.”

What’s funny about these cafes and their loyalty programs is that I’m completely disloyal to all of them.

There’s a never ending supply of coffee shops near me. I can go to Starbucks, of course, or to Intelligentsia. I have oodles of others. It’s really hard to be loyal. I really like coffee.

And as much of a creature of habit as I am, I...

Dyson loves the color pink and sparkly things.
Sometimes he wears dresses, and sometimes he wears jeans.
He likes to wear his princess tiara, even when climbing trees.
He’s a Princess Boy, and his family loves him exactly the way he is.

My Princess Boy

A few weeks ago I had the tremendous pleasure of getting to spend time with my two year old niece.

For just a few days I got to glimpse into the life of someone who gets see the world fresh for the very first time. Without any prejudices or preconceptions. What I saw those few days continues to inspire me.

One day my wife and I were watching her, and my wife was going to read one of my niece’s books to her. I was nearby and asked what she was going to read. When I heard the title “My Princess Boy”, I thought I misheard. My brain didn’t quite make sense of those words together in a title. Then I heard what the book was about.

...

I thought this was a unique and non-intuitive marketing device from Coldwater Creek, a women’s clothing store.

I’m curious if anyone reading this knows someone who works in marketing for Coldwater Creek who can shed more insight into how well this worked, or if you’ve tried a similar promotion and seen it outperform something more traditional? Email me if you want to share something.

My initial reaction was that this won’t outperform a typical online sales promotion, for example: “This weekend, for 3 days only: 30% off!”

A premise of this particular sale is to get a shopper to start worrying about scarcity, a common marketing tactic. You don’t want to miss buying something now, and risk missing the item you want because someone else purchases the inventory before you do.

Hence the “Tomorrow they may be gone!” sub-headline.

But if you are successful at getting people to start...

A junior at my old my high school, Loyola Academy, just got a perfect score on his ACT test.

A piece of advice from the article:

He also discovered on the ACT test that in the reading section, if he read the questions first, he had a better idea of what to focus on when he went back to do the reading.

I’ve constantly found this same technique to not just be invaluable for taking tests, but helpful in all sorts of things life presents you.

It’s how I passed through my entire Spanish language requirement in college even though my skill at Spanish was weak.

Before college started we were required to take a set of placement exams. As I was going through the Spanish placement test, I would read the questions first. Then as I was reading the Spanish passages for reading comprehension, even though I didn’t understand ¾ of what I was reading, I could locate the blocks of text the questions...

One thing I’ve noticed about many of the people whose creativity inspires me is that they seem to be obsessed with something.

A few random examples are folks like Jason Fried at 37signals and his obsession with cars. Or there’s Monet and his obsession with water lilies. Or the folks at OXO and their obsession with hands & gloves.

Sometimes the obsession is completely tangential to what they usually work on, but somehow eventually it finds its way back into their work. Often as inspiration.

Sometimes as gold.

One of my very favorite examples of this is Aaron Draplin and his obsession with graphic design heritage from the last 100 years. Especially old manuals, vintage ledgers and agricultural memo books.

I started finding out he was a collector of these types of things from some post of his. If I remember correctly, he was talking about going to an estate sale and going into some...