The First Lesson Was Too Simple One of the biggest things I was taught as a child was that if you are nice to people, they will be nice to you. I understand why adults teach that lesson. It encourages kindness, manners, cooperation, and basic decency. But life eventually teaches you something more complicated. Kindness
Kindness Without Boundaries Is Not Wisdom Read More »
Owning Something Means More Than Having Your Name on It I grew up in a generation where owning something meant something. A house was something you tried to own. A car was something you eventually hoped to pay off. A business was something you built so that the income, decisions, and future belonged to you.
Dr. Claud Anderson, Safe Bus, and the Meaning of Ownership Read More »
Sleeping in Front of the Life He Wanted Back around 2011, Mario Kelly’s life had fallen apart. He was unemployed, divorced, and living out of his van in Detroit. That alone would have been enough to make a lot of people feel defeated. But Mario did something unusual. Instead of parking randomly every night, he
Mario Kelly: From Sleeping in a Van to Building a Million-Dollar Future Read More »
The Story Is Real, but It Needs to Be Told Correctly There is a piece of American welfare history that deserves far more attention than it gets. You may have heard somebody say there was a law called the “No Man in the House law” that forced Black fathers out of their homes so mothers
The Welfare Rules That Policed Black Families Read More »
We Do Not Experience the World Raw Everything we call reality reaches us through a nervous system. Light enters the eyes. Sound reaches the ears. Pressure touches the skin. Chemical signals become taste and smell. Then the brain organizes all of that information into an experience that feels immediate and complete. We usually do not
What If Reality Is the Version Your Mind Knows How to Build? Read More »
The Question Sounds Different Today Before we go any further, somebody asks the woman, “Are you a gold digger?” That question used to carry a very specific image. People once imagined a gold digger as a woman chasing a man for his money, status, or lifestyle. Today, that idea is more complicated because many women
Who Is Really Digging for Gold? Read More »
Inconsistency Creates Confusion You know what may be worse than having no standards at all? Having standards that change depending on the day, the person, or your mood. One day something is unacceptable, and the next day you let the exact same thing slide. One employee misses a deadline and you address it immediately. Another
A Standard That Changes Is Not Really a Standard Read More »
I Miss the Old Internet I miss when the internet did not seem determined to sell me something every five seconds. If you were online in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, you probably remember what I mean. The internet felt rougher, slower, stranger, and somehow more personal. People built little websites that looked terrible by
When the Internet Felt Like a Place Instead of a Marketplace Read More »
The Question That Makes Christianity Uncomfortable There is a question people ask Christians all the time, and I understand why they ask it. What happens if somebody does not believe in Jesus, does not accept the Bible, but lives what most of us would call a good life? Suppose that person is kind, generous, honest,
When Being a Good Person Is Not the Whole Christian Message Read More »
The Sunday Night the Gold Window Closed On Sunday evening, August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon went on national television and announced a change that would help transform the world’s monetary system. He ordered the Treasury to suspend the convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign governments and central banks. Under the Bretton Woods system,
When Money Stopped Being Metal Read More »