I’ve got you, babe… 2009 was not a good year for me. My business was failing – I lost $100,000 in one week. Kia’s business was faltering – a luxury services don’t sell in a down economy. Relationships were stressed – financial problems don’t make for warm fuzzies. Everything was falling apart. Have one of these years? In […]
Survive or Live
12 Years a Slave In the movie 12 Years a Slave (adapted by the book of the same title), Solomon Northup is stolen from his freedom in the North to be a slave in the South. Solomon has lived a majority of his life as a free man, so the thought of slavery is completely […]
Transform | No strings attached.
Not so clever Most times I like to start off with some clever story about my past, something I’ve read or some hilarious thing my kid’s done. I’m not so clever today. I have a couple of quotes, a Jesus story and a big idea – transform. Stay with me. Hypocrisy. And in his teaching he […]
Wait. Let me take a selfie!
I was lookin’ good! This week, as I walked out the door, heading to work, Kia looked up at me. She said, “You look really nice. Take a selfie.” I’ll be honest, she was just back from a trip, wiped out and hardly awake. I don’t know if she was seeing clearly. But I did it. I […]
What do you want?
The Black Category As I write, the Oscars are on television. The buzz around the Oscar awards this year was the second consecutive year without any black nominees in the major award categories. Several well known figures were outspoken about boycotting the show (Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, Spike Lee, etc). Chris Rock, the host of […]
Think of all the posers you know | Keep it Real
Keepin’ it real. It started with my friend Shane getting real in a van full of guys he didn’t really know. He just told his story, no holds barred. 8 of us listening, amazed. At that moment, just hours into the trip, the weekend changed – the mood shifted. We went from 8 guys who had […]
BOLD Prayer | Substantially Better
BOLD Business Over the years Elon Musk founded PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Zip2 and X.com. He’s also the chairman of SolarCity and co-chairman of OpenAI. He’s a very busy and very successful man (worth over $13 Billion). So what drives him? According to Musk himself, it’s this: “I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car […]
How to measure success.
There’s always failure. Abraham Lincoln failed in business three times and lost seven political races. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school and was denied entrance to film school three times. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. Henry Ford failed in his first two business attempts. […]
Body Parts, Sexual Innuendo and Purpose.
Beyond sports talk radio This week I listened to a discussion on sports talk radio. I know the sexual puns are ridiculous, so forgive me. It’s amazing how many puns can be made about a bodily function. You want to know the worst part? It sounds like a fun job to me! This particular discussion […]
There will be a Future.
Christmas in Colombia I’ve been thinking a lot about future lately. I began near Christmas. I was watching the show Narcos on Netflix. Narcos is about the Colombian drug cartels in the late 1980’s. The show outlines the power and influence the cartels wielded, and how Colombia and the US fought them. The battle came to a head […]
