Personal Growth

Despite the extent to which I talk and think about car sharing and other newly possible. web-enabled modes of transportation, the truth is I still don’t use too many of them on a regular basis.  Need to work on that. It seems as though I need to travel to SF to get the urge to get around town in new...

I met with an entrepreneur yesterday who, in passing, mentioned Warren Buffett’s method of prioritizing (ruthlessly).  To sum it up:                Jot down a list of the 25 most important things you want to accomplish (in a month, in a year, in life).   Circle the 5 absolutely most… Continue readin...

For the past few months I have been seeing an executive coach, which has been really helpful for me. One of my issues is that I tend to keep too much work bottled up in my inbox / in my to do list.  This is a drain on productivity and a source of stress.  Part… Continue reading

Happy MLK Day everyone. I just spent the last half hour reading MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  To be totally honest, I don’t think I’ve ever read it in its entirety before.  It is incredibly powerful and moving.  I encourage anyone reading this to take some time with it today. I pulled a few ...

Yesterday, I went down to DC to visit the US Dept of Health and Human Services – and presented to their Innovation Council (a cross functional working group on innovation) about opportunities to bring “networked thinking” into the health space. This is clearly such an important area, with huge oppor...

Sunday night, Cescalouise‘s iPhone mysteriously went dark.  She had a lot going on Monday, so I gave her my phone to use, then I headed down to NYC for the day and following night. So I’ve been away from home for the last day and a half with no phone.  Not a huge deal, obviously,… Continue reading

I love Google Reader. I’ve used it for a long long time now to keep tabs on things.  I suppose it’s an old school method at this point, but I think it’s just great. The screengrab above is one of my home screens on my galaxy s3.  I have moved to a widgets-only mobile desktop,… Continue reading

I always spend a lot of time around the turn of the new year thinking about self-improvement.  This year is no different. Last summer, at a charity fundraiser for a friend, I bought several sessions of personal coaching. Throughout the fall, I’ve been working with my coach, Lisa Lahey, using her met...

Since last Friday, my life has seemingly been consumed with thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook elementary school. Maybe it’s the just horrific nature of the event. Maybe it’s that I’m a parent of two small kids, and I haven’t been able to stop hugging and kissing them and thinking about how ...

I am writing this from 30,000 feet on my way to San Francisco. I have a great car service which I use every week when I travel.  This morning, I ended up having a long conversation with Reda, one of my regular drivers, about Uber and how it’s shaking up the taxi and car service business.… Continue r...

Alex Hillman has a nice post on his response to Steven Johnson’s Where do Good Ideas Come From, thinking about how we continually process and re-process our information.  It mentions one specific method, which Steven calls “the spark file“.  The idea being that you keep a simple log of “sparks” — th...

I’ve always thought of tennis as perhaps the most difficult of sports.  It’s like hitting a baseball, but while you’re running, and with 90% of the addressable target area out of bounds (in the net, outside the lines, etc).  To top that off, you’re a team of one, battling yourself, inside your head....

A few things happened recently, which are causing an unexpected and totally interesting change in my digital life. 1) On the last day of our vacation, Theo dropped our iPad on a brick patio, smashing it to bits. 2) I realized that I could save over $100/mo by consolidating my wireless accounts, and ...

This week we are out in Cape Cod with Frannie’s family, hanging out at the beach in Truro (where, incidentally, there was a shark attack a few weeks ago).  This week, we’re renting a different house than normal — it’s an old run-down house next door to the cottages where Fran’s family has vacationed...

Last week, I spent some time shopping for a new health insurance plan for our family. Two takeaways: 1) The new Massachusetts Health Connector is really great — the health connector is a state-run exchange that helps you find, choose, and purchase a health plan, either a state-run plan or a private ...

We spent this weekend in Cape Cod w/ Frannie’s family — her family has been renting the same small cottage by the beach in Truro for 35 years or so, and we spend a lot of time out there in the summer. This year, our old friend Tati introduced perhaps the greatest beach innovation ever.… Continue rea...

I have two kids — a three year old, Theo, and Brieza, who is one.  It’s been amazing watching both of them grow. What’s funny about little kids growing is how it seems to happen in spurts.  Everything will be going along, normal day to day, and then all of a sudden you stop and… Continue reading

For the past few weeks, I’ve been involved with a community effort to draft a declaration of freedom for the Internet.  On Monday, it went live on the web, and is starting to get discussed. It’s been an amazing, fascinating and inspiring year in the internet community.  Today, the Verge has a nicely...

Yesterday at the Center for Civic Media, our lunch guest was S. Craig Watkins, a professor at UT Austin working on a variety of projects under the heading of “Connected Learning”.  In his blog post about the idea, Dr. Watkins defines this as: the increasingly complex ways in which young people’s lea...