As the family in this photograph was leaving their home in Ireland, the seven-year-old son said, “Good-bye God, we are going to Texas.”  Forced out of their home by the potato famine, they moved to a farm they bought in Texas.  The new land was suitable for grazing cattle, but not much good for farming.  The family lived in a tent for years, with sheets dividing the “living room” from the “bedroom.”  When he was eleven, the boy got a job as a water boy for a railroad constructio...

Continue reading ...

These two lines from Obama’s inaugural speech are a good start to addressing problems.  They don’t deny the difficulty, but call for moving forward together instead of retreating into fear and division

Continue reading ...

        
Tackling a challenging goal can be a fun adventure, if you are properly prepared.  But if you only think about the distant goal and ignore the “minor details”, the small omissions will make your trip painful and may prevent you from ever achieving your goal.
Continue reading ...

I had plans, and tickets, to return home from Texas via St.Louis.  An ice storm got in my way.  If I stuck with my plan, I'd be sitting in San Antonio still waiting for an empty seat after the storm finally cleared.  Making an early switch to a southern route let me get home only 2 hours after my original plan.
My natural tendency is to be persistent in the face of a challenge.  However, Persistence is a good trait only if you are persistently doing something productive.  Sometimes it is bette...
Continue reading ...

                        

Very few trips work out exactly as planned.  Weather is only one of the things that are beyond are control.  Blaming external conditions for messing up our plans doesn’t help us get to our destination.  If we don’t think of ourselves as victims of circumstances, we can always find something that we can control to get headed back in the right direction.

...

Continue reading ...