to go. They needed a transition. So we were chosen. Eighty percent of Native people between eighteen and thirty have been incarcerated. And while they were doing their time, they wanted their kids safe. They wanted help and they found their way to our school. One particular person applied, Clyde Screaming Eagle Salazar. Basically, he was the last man off of Alcatraz. He was slinging heroin. Where did he learn heroin? He was in the armed service. He said this feels good, but he also made a business of it and ended up in Alcatraz. The reason I say this is that you never know who your teacher is going to be. They’re not who you think they’re going to be or look like, or eve... posted on Aug 16 2016 (15,903 reads)

cannot coexist… Romantic temperament … equates spontaneity and truth. But the word art is neighbor to artifice, and in human culture, as in the animal and vegetable worlds, desirability entails not only the impulse of the moment but also enchantment, exaggeration, rearrangement, and deception. We don’t find the fragrance of night-scented flowering tobacco or the display of a peacock’s tail insincere — by such ruses this world conducts its erotic business. To acknowledge rhetoric’s presence in the beauty of poems, or any other form of speech, is only to agree to what already is. In another thought cast at poetry but ablaze with trut... posted on Sep 6 2016 (11,005 reads)

an online shop full of beautiful stuff I didn’t need. It was worse when I actually bought stuff. So what happened for me was that I reclaimed some of that most valued entity—time. Beyond that, I don’t burn with longing; I use what I have. And when I do make a rare purchase or get an awesome clothing-swap giveaway, I really appreciate the piece. Loeffelholz Dunn: “Covet counseling” has a mental health piece to it. When you studied consumer behavior in the business school at University of Toronto, what did you learn about the emotional aspect of shopping? The way we shop has deep social justice implications. Lazarovic: The gist is that we are... posted on Sep 9 2016 (18,712 reads)

profound way. It wasn’t a handful of cash or a lead on a job for her husband, but maybe – just maybe – it would make her life better. My heart pounded as I approached the woman.  “Excuse me,” I said, my voice trembling a bit. “I couldn’t help overhearing what you said to the cashier. It sounds like you’re going through a really hard time right now. I’m so sorry. I’d like to give you something.” And I handed her a business-sized card. When the woman read the card’s only two words, she began to cry. And through her tears, she said, “You have no idea how much this means to me.” I was a lit... posted on Nov 10 2020 (106,208 reads)

Hav a Sole's pop-up shops, the homeless and children living in poverty can pick out a free pair of designer shoes. The sneaker business has never been bigger than it is today. Since 2004, sales of high-end athletic shoes increased by 40 percent to nearly $55 billion, and the resale market generates more than $1 billion. Now, one former sneakerhead hopes to put a little soul back in the soles of homeless people and disadvantaged youth by gifting them a brand new or gently worn pair. Watch the video above to see how Rikki Mendias, founder of the grassroots nonprofit Hav a Sole, uses his background in fashion photography and social media marketing to solicit ... posted on Oct 27 2016 (13,472 reads)

do you think I should work?” Fast food like Wendy’s or casual dining like Chili’s? he asked. Houser paused before saying, “Sir, I think you should work for whomever hires you first.” That exchange occurred in 2007, and Houser pondered it for more than a year, feeling helpless at first, then angry at the lack of opportunities for the young men trying to leave their mistakes behind. One night in 2009, as he was closing up Parigi after dinner service, he told his business partner he felt dishonest. A year had passed, and the boys at the Youth Village weren’t any better off. He felt like he’d broken a promise. “I just want to open a restaurant... posted on Nov 2 2016 (12,702 reads)

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell from their innocence. They grew embarrassed and fretful, self-conscious. And they learned, a little too late, perhaps, that there are certainly some things that we need to know, but there are many, many more that are better left unexplored. Now, when I was a kid, I knew it all, of course. I had been spending 20 years in classrooms collecting facts, and I was actually in the information business, writing articles for Time Magazine. And I took my first real trip to Japan for two-and-a-half weeks, and I came back with a 40-page essay explaining every last detail abo... posted on Nov 7 2016 (20,437 reads)

started by asking better questions. What do I care about? What matters to me? What don’t I know? If wasn’t worried about what others thought, what would I do? What truly lights me up? As I explored these questions, I began drawing these little stick figure illustrations about what I was uncovering and sharing them on Facebook. It was a way for me to make sense of what I was learning and share it with others.   Eventually I left Facebook. Since then, I started and ended a business. I became and unbecame a life coach about three times. I had 6ish relationships I lived in 5 different houses in 4 different neighborhoods. I tried on 12 different spiritual traditions. I tra... posted on Nov 21 2016 (34,970 reads)

by local supermarkets. In Lisbon, the Frutafeia co-operative campaigns against standardization in foodstuffs, especially vegetables, while Berlin’s ‘social fridges’ offer self-service food for free to people who are homeless. In the current dominant system of food consumption and the culture of rush, a daily mountain of edible food that’s thrown into a bin is not considered a failure—it’s simply one of the many consequences of doing business as usual. To reverse that process, we all have to put our shopping into question. This is a shorter version of a longer piece that can be found here.  ... posted on Nov 27 2016 (13,055 reads)

But much of the new evidence suggests that self-control is most effective when it operates through habits. People use their self-control to break bad habits and establish good ones, and then life can run smoothly and successfully, with low levels of stress, regret, and guilt. Viewed in that perspective, virtue is best achieved when self-control is exerted so as to establish habits of good behavior. Part of the reason is that using willpower to resist temptation is a strenuous, costly business with unreliable results. Habits are far more reliable than that. Two decades’ worth of lab research has established that willpower is limited, and exerting self-control to resist imp... posted on Dec 19 2016 (14,002 reads)

R. Trower Behavioral economist Dan Ariely points out the surprising joy and engagement we feel when we make things. We are the CEOs of our own lives. We work hard to spur ourselves to get up and go to work and do what we must do day after day. We also try to encourage people to work for and with us. We do this in our personal lives, too: from a very young age, kids try to persuade their parents to do things for them. As adults, we try to encourage our significant others to do things for us; we attempt to get our kids to clean up their rooms; and we try to induce our neighbors to trim their hedges or help out with a block party. Rather than seeing motivation as a simple, rat... posted on Dec 26 2016 (15,704 reads)

figure out how to manifest that in a different way to the rest of the world. TS: Now, in Becoming Wise, you write, again, in the beginning of the book that the connective tissue that runs throughout the entire book is the language of a surprising word here, Krista: "virtue." The language of virtue. KT: Really? That's surprising? TS: I felt really surprised by it. It's a word that I love; I love virtue, and I think a lot about bringing virtue into business, which can seem contradictory to people. But it's really important to me. But then you said something about virtue—that you believe that this is now a magnetic word, especially for ... posted on Dec 31 2016 (13,220 reads)

heart not your paycheck. Where others might have felt scarcity and tried to cut back on giving gifts, this man instead asked his wife to go ahead and spend $100 to buy gift cards to share with hard-working hospital staff . (More) Mitzvah for the Syrian Refugees The temple she works at is involved in helping Syrian refugee families. She took time to go to their homes personally.  After seeing what was needed, she worked with her husband who is in wholesale furniture business, to get donations of furniture they really need. The kids will now have  mattresses and a bunk bed. Her “mitzvah” (a good deed in Jewish) brought two families together in the... posted on Jan 4 2017 (19,385 reads)

by opening the door to the first classroom - the natural world, from backyards to neighborhoods to parks and public places."  Siblings: How to Help them be Friends Forever: "I know that most siblings fight, and that social scientists have consistently recorded high levels of hostility in sibling relationships relative to other relationships. But this is not okay with me; I want my kids to be kind to each other. My dad and his brother are lifelong best friends and business partners. My brother and I are close friends. I want this for my kids, too. But how? Fortunately, we parents of multiple children have some good science to guide us.” Does Forgivenes... posted on Jan 10 2017 (10,577 reads)

No one made you do this. To act as though you’re burdened by your gifts, and burdened by your talent and exhausted by your creative endeavors, as though you were committed to it by an evil dictator rather than having chosen it with your free will is also ridiculous. And finally, and worst of all, you’re scaring inspiration away. Inspiration, like all of us, wants to be loved and appreciated, and if it hears you talking about how much it’s ruining your life, it will take its business elsewhere. So whenever I hear creative people complaining about how it’s a battlefield, and how they’re bleeding over their work, and how awful it is, I always want to whisper to ... posted on Jan 11 2017 (28,523 reads)

beauty always reflects on the outside. This is something we have all heard time and again. But then, do we spend less time in front of the mirror? Do we still pay attention to outward appearances and draw a lot of conclusions based on those? We have not stopped making external appearances a topic of conversation at most social gatherings – business or otherwise. We still spend a lot of time getting ready for an event, office, function or a party. Roald Dahl wrote, “You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”  Thi... posted on Jan 28 2017 (24,494 reads)

reach. Through her work with GLG, Riva has focused on plans for national expansion, positioning her organization for growth, and developing data security infrastructure to support key constituencies. Riva points to one Compass client as a prime example of that vision in action. Vilmarys Cintron was raising her daughters in the very same public housing complex she’d grown up in. But after graduating from the Compass program, she was able to buy her own home and start a daycare business. “The day that Vilmarys moved out of public housing, we received several calls from other people in her development asking, ‘What’s the program that Vilmarys did, and how ca... posted on Mar 2 2017 (12,936 reads)

1999 Liz Mitten Ryan, award-winning artist, mother of six and founder of a successful fine art publishing company in Vancouver, traded in the secure terrain of her known life to move with her architect husband, and a herd of eleven horses, to Gateway 2 Ranch -- a 320-acre slice of paradise nestled in the grasslands of British Columbia. For several months their home was a simple tent in the midst of an enchanted landscape studded with lakes, wild flowers, emerald hills and whispering woods. In this vast solitude it became customary for Liz to spend her days following the herd. Communing with them she began to recognize their deep gift for  connection to all of life, and how bei... posted on Mar 9 2017 (16,614 reads)

bone fractures overnight. When Weiss asked Jimmy what he did to heal, the answer was always the same: “I told you. I get out of the way. Creator comes through me; the spirits of my ancestors come through me and they heal.” A graduate of Washington and Jefferson College with a B.A. in biology/pre-medicine, Weiss completed several years of graduate study in insect ecology and zoology at the University of Maine. During this period he established an environmental consulting business and was supported by the National Science Foundation for environmental curriculum development at the University of Maine. In 1985 he graduated from the University of New England College of Os... posted on Apr 10 2017 (20,498 reads)

point for setting up Toybox Mums as a playful space (both physical and online) where mums can develop their own skills and contribute to toy designs that will improve their children’s capacities. Toys are tools that can connect people, generate new ideas, and nurture new ways of interacting with each-other. The seeds of Toybox began a few years back, but it wasn’t until 2016 that I developed the actual concept. I held the first inception workshop with ten other young mums and a business innovation specialist in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2017. We played around with three questions: How can we create toys that facilitate inter-generational play? How can we create gende... posted on Mar 28 2017 (11,983 reads)