Yesterday evening, in a local cigar shop, there was a conversation held about belief in God. I use the capital “G” there for God, because the conversation started out about whether or not one man’s son believed in God. It quickly morphed into a discussion about the difference between “belief in God,” and “belief in…
This entry is about living your life in excess but bear with me for a few moments as I share a story with you from my recent past. I was working at The Tiki Tobacco Barn – a name that may not make sense except that it was a cigar shop located on the property…
“Only a Sith deals in such absolutes.” Obi-Wan Kenobi. I couldn’t help myself. I had to open with that. The entire Star Wars franchise depicts the Sith as evil and selfish, so when I started thinking about these two words that express absolutes – always and never – I immediately attached them to “the Sith.”…
I will never forget parts of my childhood and one of the things I remember best is my father complaining about how he could never get the grass to grow healthy. He’d complain about weeds; he’d complain about fungus; he’d complain about too little rain, too much rain, not enough sunshine, kids in the yard…
The term “Butterfly Effect” means different things to different people – or many things to each individual. Two movies come to mind when I read or hear “the butterfly effect.” First is the Ashton Kutcher movie of the same title that came out in 2004. The second is Jurassic Park (the first one) where in…
One of my all-time favorite motivational quotes is: “I WILL do today what others WON’T so that I CAN do tomorrow what others CAN’T.” What does that mean? Think about it a moment. It means that what we do today can either help us prepare to make greater accomplishments tomorrow or we can do less…
Have you ever considered the distinct difference between placing blame, finding fault and determining responsibility? They are surely all interconnected but they are also vastly different in leadership approach, critique for improvement and personal involvement in finding and enacting the solution. In a recent piece about Leadership and Management we identified several characteristics of leadership…
Any time you put an Army veteran and a Marine Corps veteran at a table together in a social setting you will get the inevitable “insults.” They aren’t serious. Every veteran knows the mutual respect that flows and we have a lot of fun with it by picking on each other. For all that, one…
There are many different kinds of energy, and that’s not even getting into the existential discussion about Einstein’s theory and how all mass is also energy. No, I’m talking about the energies each of us contains: physical energy, mental energy, emotional energy. We also have spiritual energy although some would argue that’s just a combination…
There’s an old joke about how some people are so stupid they would bang on their hand with a hammer just so they could enjoy how good it feels to stop. While none of us can imagine why anyone would voluntarily hurt themselves just so they could enjoy it when they stop, the “joke” does…
There is a running joke in my family regarding this old and common event: Someone loses something (like their keys.) They spend some time looking and other family members notice. Finally, they find their keys (as the example) and someone will ask, “So did you find what you were looking for?” All too often the…
This is always a good conversation starter: Do you believe in ghosts? The answers vary from, “Nope. They don’t exist,” to “Yes, I’ve seen one!” What’s funny is to listen to the conversation, always inserting just enough input to keep it going, and realize how many different ideas there are of what a “ghost” is….
Almost daily you can hear someone complain about their life, their day, some part of their job or something else. The commonality across their statements is that something is wrong somehow and they’re not happy. Stop and take a minute to consider what they’re complaining about and most often you can recognize a common cause…
Each of us… every single one of us knows what it’s like to fall down. We’ve done it. It’s not something we can “relate” to because we’ve seen someone else do it. It’s something we’ve done: as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, as a middle aged individual and (unfortunately) sometimes as…
Inspired by Michelle Johnson-Brown, From the Cigar Lounge Wisdom series It was a mid-July evening and, as I have for many an evening, I sat at the local cigar bar and enjoyed the company of some friends. One young lady and I had previously enjoyed a contemplative conversation about the human spirit and everything that goes…
Someone once said that there are two truly important days in our life: the day we are born and the day we discover what we were born for. That “what we were born for” could also be described as our purpose in this life. It’s something a great many people search for over a span…
When we hear someone say, “He’s a strong person,” or “She has great inner strength,” it can mean different things to each of us. The word “strong” has a wide variety of definitions available for it, but the one(s) I want to concentrate on here are those relating to strength of character; strength of spirit….
Here we are in the early years of the 21st century. It’s a setting saturated with social media. Some of those outlets I can think of off the top of my head are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. The existence of these social outlets has allowed for people to become quite popular for…
Creating A Contemporary Warrior, Part One Being armed does not a warrior make. Being willing to fight does not a warrior make. Warrior: 1) a person engaged or experienced in warfare; soldier. 2) a person who shows or has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness.
In the course of several conversations I’ve had a number of people ask me if I ever remember my dreams. Many of those I was talking to apparently don’t. My answer is: I didn’t used to but I wanted to so I studied the topic and found that, allegedly, I could train my brain to…