5 Ways to Separate Stimulus from Response and Express Yourself More Authentically — The medium is the mimesis. Most of us are price-takers in the market of communication. We don’t set the tone; we adopt one. Receive a passive aggressive email, send a passive aggressive email. See a bunch of snarky tweets in your feed, you tweet snark. Get emoji-filled text, send emoji-filled…

You would be mistaken to think it’s a book about business — “Wanting is the clearest, most accessible introduction to René Girard available.” — Peter Thiel Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, is one of the most brilliant and subversive books on startups — and on business in general — ever written. It…

My first retreat in 2009 changed my life. I can’t unsee what I saw, I can’t unhear what I heard. They should be normalized. — — From my journal, written at a small retreat house in Flagstaff, Arizona, 2009. I haven’t eaten in 2 days, I haven’t heard a human word in 3. If I found a cigarette, I’d smoke it. The weight of this particular life decision is now apparent; the weight of all…

He is a flawed human like the rest of us, and the problems of social media are not technological problems but profoundly human — I have to admit that I’m growing tired of the ‘dopamine hit’ critique of social media (disseminated in the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’), which gives the impression the human beings are merely sheep being manipulated by big tech like pavlovian dogs; and I’m growing even more tired of the ‘social…

Love in the Ruins of Corporate America — A few decades ago, a well-respected professor of strategy at a business school in Spain wrote a line inspired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman on the board of the classroom: “The only purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder profit.” A young student named Carlos was outraged. He…

The Pursuit of Thicker Desire in an Ever-Thinning World — Franz Kafka wrote one of his most important works near the end of his life, a short story he titled A Hunger Artist, published in 1922. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, “fasting artists” — basically, living skeletons — were exhibited at fairs and circuses. People paid a price…

The Way We Respond to Values Ends Up Shaping Our Character and Our Destiny — I once made a solo snowboarding trip to Big Bear Mountain in 2010 and spent the entire weekend reading and studying Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics from start to finish. I never made it to the mountain, and I didn’t care. In his work, I found a key to understanding questions…

Peeling Back the Layers of the Entrepreneurial Onion to Find Humanity and Soul at the Center — This is part of the story behind the story found in the introduction to my book, Wanting. I’ve never told this part before. My story was sad. But like anyone addicted to Hustle Porn and hustle culture, I didn’t believe in sad stories — let alone my own. Like most…

Manifesting One’s Innermost Thoughts and Moral Convictions Should Never Be Done at Gunpoint — “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your peals before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.” — Mt 7 We live in a society where people are forced to manifest their conscience on issues ranging from sexuality…