-
A Rosy Rear-View Mirror
The boat we keep at the island is named the SS Hassle. The process for buying it involved punching a hole in the side of it, patching that hole, buying a new motor because the first one stopped working, sleeping in the car for two nights because the new motor didn’t work either, and manually…
-
Huge Decisions
My cousin is deciding which college to go to. There’s pressure, because this is going to be one of the biggest decisions of her life. I was thinking about that tonight as she and her mother talked about schools all over the US with all sorts of pros and cons. The course of her life…
-
Skeptical of Studies
Whenever I see a headline that begins with “New Study Proves…”, I skip over it and move on to the next one. I love science, and I even like studies, but I have a big problem with the way studies are framed today, especially in the media. There are two major things wrong with these…
-
Drinking Tea While Traveling
For a while I just accepted that I wouldn’t have good tea when I traveled. I drank good tea in my RV, or at Samovar, but would drink nothing but water when I was on the road. I slowly began to experiment with ways to have tea on the go, and now I really have…
-
EV (How to Make All Decisions)
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time, because it’s the kind of post that will allow me to write more posts, linking this one as background. Because it’s so important, I’ve been waiting for the right time to write it. Sometime like now, when I’m fed, tea-caffeinated, motivated, and have a…
-
Get to the Airport Late But Don’t Miss Your Flight
I travel a lot. Not as much as a lot of business travelers, but maybe in the top 1% for independent travelers. That means that I spend a lot of time on planes, in airports, and experiencing just about every air-travel scenario possible. People get to airports ridiculously early in fear of missing their flights.…
-
Very Quick to Act
When I think about a lot of the good things that have happened to me over the course of my life so far, a huge number of them can be directly attributed to my willingness to act very quickly. I think that the benefits of near-instant decision making, even/especially on big decisions, are hugely underrated.…
-
Momentum
Later in the day, after spending hours exploring the pyramids in Cairo, we rented some busted up four-wheelers and took to the desert behind the pyramids. Driving over a huge dune, pyramids being revealed as you ascend, is a truly breathtaking sight. You can almost imagine what it would have been like to ride a…
-
Perspective From a Tomb
I was enveloped by a red granite box, not much larger than myself. There was no lid, so I could look up at the red granite ceiling. I lay in the tomb of Cheops in the largest pyramid of Giza. Our guide switched off the ventilation fans for a few minutes to create silence. I…
-
Short Trips and Long Trips
Sometimes a preference can morph from being your best assessment of a particular situation into a fixture of who you are. When that happens, you’re in a bad position to reevaluate and make a better decision, because your ego gets caught up in that decision. That happened to me when I decided that I preferred…
