I walked into a tattoo shop down the street to get my first tattoo. It was going to say memento mori. In latin: “Remember you will die.” It’d be a permanent reminder that time is precious.
Nobody working in the shop says anything to me. I sit down and start leafing through those books of ready-made tattoos.
Tattoo machines are buzzing away in the background, laying down lines of permanent ink, and...
You know those people whose lives are transformed by changing their diet or daily journaling or meditating or something like that?
It wasn’t the meditation or whatever that changed their life. No, it was cultivating the discipline to do that thing day after day and week after week and month after month.
Because nobody on the planet tries meditation for seven minutes one Saturday morning and their life miraculously changes. In reality, it’s often a hard journey.
You...
Nothing kills young companies faster than wasting money.
You see it all the time in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs who burn through their cash. They rent office space with exposed brick walls. Buy expensive nut bars drizzled with dark chocolate.
Meanwhile, their scrappy counterparts move across the bay to Oakland. The rent is cheaper and they know every dollar they waste is stealing a dollar from building whatever needs to be built. Dollars are precious.
I once worked...
Washing dishes was how I earned my first paycheck. When you’re 15 years old and don’t get money from your parents to buy things then you have to work.
So there I was scrubbing dishes in the filthy kitchen of a small family-owned Italian restaurant, and it’s where I learned a little life lesson.
Work is nothing more than trading time for money. A medium of exchange.
You provide one hour of time to an employer and they provide an hour’s wage. I quickly discovered...
A lot of people ask me how it is living in Madison, and I tell them it’s one of the most livable cities in America. It’s so livable I just got rid of my car.
It does revolve around the schedules for the University of Wisconsin athletic teams. That, and the Green Bay Packers.
I don’t care about sports, but that’s not a popular thing to say here when people feel so strongly about these teams.
And...
