by Gosh! Kids This Is How You Turn Your Dreams Into Reality Five years ago, I stopped setting goals. Unconventional, yes, and rather antithetical, especially now, when most people are almost three months into realising their goals. But it’s true. I don’t set goals anymore. In fact, I’ve gone as far as to remove the word from my life, and to refrain from using it in any professional or personal conversation. I’m not trying to lose a certain amount of weight. I’m not trying to hit a personal...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Make This Your Resolution For Life Even as a child living in poverty, Lincoln dreamed big. He couldn’t afford to go to school, except sporadically, a chance once in a while. But his nose was always in a book. It was said that when he got a copy of the Bible or Aesop's Fables, he was so excited he couldn't sleep. “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,” the poet Emily Dickinson once said. Though he would never travel to Europe, he always spoke of it as if he had been there....
3 months ago • 7 min read
Honesty is a virtue. Patience is a virtue. So is wisdom. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Plato called them the four cardinal virtues for ethical living For sure, they're needed. The more humanity embodies them, the further we progress as a species. But what about gratitude? It's more complex than you think, and one of those that spell ironic, like Black Friday and Thanksgiving. Ironic because, as we spend hours waiting in line, shoving strangers, and spending money on things we don’t need, just...
4 months ago • 8 min read
A Practice That Made My Life Good Seneca, a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, wrote a letter to his young friend, Lucilius, outlining the formula for a good life. The message seemed to be a premonition, a warning of sort, to the struggles the young man would eventually face. “Each day,” Seneca wrote, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested...
5 months ago • 8 min read
Have You Done Enough of This? In filmmaking, there’s a plot structure called the “Amnesiac Story.” The protagonist is awakened from an unconsciousness. He finds himself in a place he does not recognise. There is no recollection of his present circumstances, and he does not remember who he is. Yet one thing is clear: he knows he is somebody. He knows he is of remarkable importance. He knows that time is not on his side, and what he must do now is to retrace his steps and make sense of this...
8 months ago • 6 min read
Resist The Temptation To Tell Your Kids This The thing about working hard is that sometimes, it gives you the results you expect. Sometimes, it does not. Two people of the same age, same background, same IQ could follow the playbook word-for-word and yet experience two completely different outcomes. Either way, this teaches us a couple of important lessons. For one, life isn’t fair. It’s a hard knock. In fact, it might be a little more unfair than not, which is why conventional wisdom...
9 months ago • 6 min read
Two weeks ago, we went to Okinawa. We got in early, picked up our car and headed north. Just three months ago we were here. Now we’re back to tie up the ends of our creative culture camp happening later this year. Smack in the confluence of the East China Sea and Philippine Sea, Okinawa is an oddly-shaped, elongated strip of land divorced from the mainland, equidistant from China, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines. Put on your political lens and it might seem like a strategic launchpad for...
9 months ago • 6 min read
Life was hard for Bill Russell. He was, after all, a black man growing up in 1940s Monroe, Louisiana. It was a segregated city. Racism, vice, and all sorts of debauchery were prevalent. His dad, being unemployed, decided to move the family of four to Oakland, California, in hopes of a better life. Still, opportunities were scarce. They had to suffer through bouts of poverty, jumping between public housing projects, doing everything and anything to make ends meet. Eventually, his father found...
10 months ago • 3 min read
There’s a big difference between having a kid, Barack Obama once said, and being a parent. Giving birth to a child does not automatically make you a father or mother. Neither does it make you a person with the ability to make a child. It is, at its core, the courage to raise a child that makes you a parent. But of course, being a parent means you can't escape the unpleasant responsibilities, the things-you-rather-not-do if you were given a choice. You cleanse and nourish and attire and cradle...
11 months ago • 5 min read