The reason comes from the healthiest instincts of the free enterpriser…. — Just for kicks, let’s try a thought experiment. It’ll rely on simple arithmetic and answer one question: to earn a billion dollars in a year, how much would you have to earn, on average, in an hour. I’ll assume a standard workweek, full-time (40 hours) work. …

How would you respond? Could you control your response? — Lately we’ve had a number of fires in the region where my wife and I make our home: Bío-Bío, in south-central Chile, near the city of Concepción. Scuttlebutt has it that the fires are being set, although no culprits have been caught. …

Advice from the quiet past, relevant to our stormy present. — Stoicism reduces to a few suggestions: easy to write, difficult to practice. (1) Determine to be calm. (2) Observe what is happening around you. (3) Focus on what you can control. (4) Do the right thing. “The first rule,” advises Marcus Aurelius, “is to keep an untroubled spirit. …

Because if time can’t be managed, nothing else can be managed. — Marcus Aurelius once observed, “Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’” Excellent advice! And never more relevant than now! It’s often said, we live in an attention…

Because I’ll never buy a lottery ticket. Here’s why…. — Sean Kernan’s article on the story of Tonda Dickerson, the waitress who won $10M on a lottery ticket a customer left her as a tip and then saw her life fall apart, got me thinking. What began as a comment intended for his page quickly grew too long. …

Increase the range of what you can control … but do it ethically! — Stoicism begins by urging us to focus on what we can control, setting aside what we can’t control. We can’t control the majority of the events around us, other people and their thoughts and responses, or what they believe and do, any more than we can control the weather, or…

Will you let this happen to you? — Imagine this scenario. Warning: it’s not going to be comfortable. You’re on your deathbed. The specifics of how you got here don’t matter. It could have been something sudden and unexpected. Shit happens. The point is, you’re going to die, and soon. It could be tomorrow, the next day, or…

Can we talk? — I wasn’t sure I wanted to start this year off writing about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For one thing, I’m white. For another, it might come off as virtue-signaling. For a third, surely others will have done it, and probably better. But I looked at my two Medium feeds…

It is up to us to find a way to an open future that fixes the problems of the present. — Part 3 of 3 (Part 1, Part 2) “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -R. Buckminster Fuller “I have become convinced that we need to decentralize our political and economic structures and broaden our…