Category: Voice/Tone/Trust Building

Make Your Stories Better

by on
12 COMMENTS

I had dinner last night with two of my oldest friends. Rick, Terry, and I first met in 1982, when we all belonged to the same karate school on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. For the next several years, it was a central part of our lives; we saw each other, in and out of the school, all the time. Thirty-nine years later, we still get together. Not often – about once a year – and always for dinner at the same restaurant. Interestingly, our dinner conversations are almost entirely confined to […] Click to read more…

Winning the Content Game

by on
19 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) Amazon doesn’t know it, but its delivery drivers are unwitting participants in a game that my son Evan and I have been playing for the past several months. Here’s how it works… Like most of us, Evan orders a lot of things on Amazon; he might get two or even three deliveries in a single week. And Amazon, you may have noticed, now has its drivers take pictures of the packages after leaving them at your door. The pictures appear with the delivery confirmation emails. […] Click to read more…

It Ain’t The Meat, It’s The Motion

by on
34 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) The first job I had after graduating from college was as a bank teller at the Brookline Savings Bank in Brookline, Massachusetts. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do have a liberal arts degree.) It was a great job – the best one I ever had, before or since. Fast-paced, varied, independent, and thanks to the fact that at the end of each shift you were responsible for “balancing” all the transactions, it had a built-in means of determining how successful you had been over […] Click to read more…

In a Pickle

by on
19 COMMENTS

Maybe you’ve heard. Tennis and Ping Pong had a baby – they named it “Pickleball.” This game/sport is kind of a hybrid of the two, played with paddles, a wiffleball and a court with painted lines and a net strung across the middle. I’ve been playing it for the last couple of months, something I never anticipated. First, because I decided long ago that I would commit what little competitive testosterone I had left to playing basketball. But with that shut down for the foreseeable future, I was in search […] Click to read more…

Emotional Rescue

by on
22 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) Unlike many of my married, male friends, I do a fair amount of the household grocery shopping. Not because I’m so wonderful, mind you (although I am distractingly good looking). Rather, it’s because years ago, as a first-time father, I realized that a trip to the grocery store came packaged with 60 minutes of diaper-free peace and quiet. And so, all these years later, it’s still an activity I share with my wife, Linda. But, as you’ve probably noticed, grocery shopping today is a totally […] Click to read more…