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My Video Entries
Category Archives: Notes from Real Thinkers
Why Orwellian selfishness matters to me
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm have long been heralded for their prescient storylines and earned the writer a reputation as one of the greatest in the English language. And it didn’t stop there. In between the two, in 1946, he wrote an essay entitled Why I Write, which with classic Orwellian insight described [...]
Getting out from the rock and the hard place without all the added emotion
I’ve been thinking lately about how binary I can often be. There are days when despite what I believe about balance, I feel either wildly successful or like a pitiful loser; either ready to trial-run the Comrades Marathon or too flat to pick up the phone, often without allowing myself access to any of the [...]
Posted in Notes from Real Thinkers, Observations, The Laws of Colinism
Tagged as: A rock and a hard place, choices, emotion, pressure
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A lesson awesome enough that I blogged about Spanx
Chances are if you’re a woman, or in a relationship with a woman, you know what Spanx are. But while I know that they are wildly popular with the fairer sex, from Hollywood actresses to the women in my office, I had never given more than ten seconds worth of thought to them until around [...]
Posted in Notes from Real Thinkers, Observations, The Laws of Colinism
Tagged as: $1 billion, $5000, commodity, department store, gift, Hollywood, lesson, marketing, Oxford Street, packaging, Sara Blakely, Selfridges, Spanx
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Do you believe in life before death?
I don’t know how spiritual I am. I don’t know if I’m spiritual at all for that matter. I know that I find there is enough to do on this bank of the River Styx to worry too much about what might come later. But I worry sometimes that I’m not exactly nailing this whole [...]
Posted in Notes from Real Thinkers, The Laws of Colinism
Tagged as: Afterlife, David Foster Wallace, Death, gratitude, Life, recedivism, River Styx, Wall Street Journal
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Alone: the awesome lesson of Charles Lindbergh
There are things that men used to know about themselves which have largely been forgotten in a world where office-based desk jobs are more common than opportunities to explore. To me, the most fascinating, and possibly the most crucial is that of knowing how to go it alone. Knowing how to trust your own instincts [...]
Posted in Notes from Real Thinkers, Observations, The Laws of Colinism
Tagged as: 1927, Alone, Charles Lindbergh, Lindbergh, Lindy, New York, Orteig Prize, Paris, self-belief, self-reliance, solo flight, Spirit of St. Louis
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We don’t want to believe what we know
Filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand says that ‘we don’t want to believe what we know’ in his TED talk about the state of the planet. In context, he is talking about the looming exhaustion of our natural resources and the ways in which ecosystems are going to be wiped out by sea temperature changes. But the statement itself [...]
Posted in Culture Heroes, Notes from Real Thinkers, The Laws of Colinism
Tagged as: belief, climate, climate change, knowledge, TED, Yann Arthus-Bertrand
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Culture Heroes: NASA’s Apollo Teams: R&D-I-Y and one of the greatest stories ever told
Between April 11 – 17, 1970, the Apollo 13 saga gripped much of the world as three NASA spacemen in a badly-damaged ship wound their way around the moon and home to Earth with all bets of their survival fundamentally off. Or at least that’s how it seemed to the world at large. But there [...]
Culture Hero: Daryn Basson, founder of Del Fuego Designs. ‘I just do sh*t the way it’s intended.’
Disclaimer: this time I’m writing about a friend, but I’m doing so unprompted and without remuneration; just with a sincere sense of appreciation for the way he’s innovating customer service based on what can only be described as engulfing engagement. His name’s Daryn Basson and his company is the up-and-coming Del Fuego Designs; a South [...]
Nothing prevents astronomical achievement quite like marginal success
I love this comment by Missing Link‘s Rich Mulholland in his comment on a recent blogpost: Nothing prevents astronomical achievement quite like marginal success. I love it because it’s a simple statement that contains a very deep truth. We all aim to be successful and those dreams we dream when we start out tend to [...]
Wish for wisdom and courage, not for things
Few things matter more than having the balls to take a stand and the contextual knowledge to back it up. One without the other is pretty useless; balls without knowledge is mere cockiness and knowledge without balls condemns you to slavery to anyone cockier than you. And yet I’m reminded of a story I read [...]
