If you want to write a song, or a poem, or a book? To start a business, a project, a relationship? To live a life? Here’s how I think it may work.

Pindar asked if there were any questions, and the young man in the row behind me raised his hand. I turned to look at him, and saw an expression of eagerness, self-consciousness, determination, and fluster, all in roughly equal measure. A mix Pindar had seen many times before, no doubt.

There are two kinds of leadership: a style of leadership that pushes, and a kind that pulls. Guess which one moves people further?

Because there are two kinds of leadership. You can take leadership. Or you can *give* leadership.

It took Jack Roy three long decades of heartache, depression, struggle, and repeated failure to reach the far shores of career success, and he nearly drowned many times during the swim across.

Assumptions, said Henry Winkler, are the termites of relationships. The best known remedy: ask for clarification.

When you loose the bonds of everyday distraction and slip deep into the ocean of possibility that surrounds us, you magnetize what you visualize. Sometimes the results are flat out hilarious.

Every creative act is a love song, whether its result is sixty-two times more massive than the sun or as weightless as a few words of heartfelt encouragement to a friend.

Writing, like living, requires these three attributes: the courage to throw down mud onto the page, the honesty to recognize it as mud, and the humility to revise and rework it.

When I was fourteen I spent a year being depressed. It turned out to be a precious gift.