We’ve killed truth with feeling, and reality has become what you believe. It’s problematic because feelings fluctuate, creating an intense anxiety as you doom scroll headlines and social media to benchmark your levels of hope and despair each morning. Resilience may have been the buzzword of the pandemic, but now is the era of ambiguity …
There’s a term in psychology called “psychic numbing” – a concept that argues “the more people suffer or die, the less we care.” Meaning, one life is incredibly important to us, but the human mind isn’t capable of comprehending the significance of huge numbers, because they mean less to us personally. “From an evolutionary perspective, …
Learn to wait, to be disciplined, to be purposeful. Your ability to tolerate time is an asset. The absence of motion isn’t always stagnation; sometimes, it’s strategy. It takes skill to be still, to sit and watch and listen. For writers, that’s when details are gathered, thoughts and sentences are tested and organized, and stories …
What are memories? Science tells us that when we learn something, we form connections between neurons in the brain. “These synapses create new circuits between nerve cells, essentially remapping the brain. The sheer number of possible connections gives the brain unfathomable flexibility – each of the brain’s 100 billion nerve cells can have 10,000 connections to other …
Good writers are dangerous – we test and tinker and tweak until we know what will play well, dialing up or down to match or change the atmosphere. Make no mistake, every message has been carefully constructed to elicit response, incite action, or influence emotion. Nothing is objective. Whenever we communicate, we must therefore do …
We cannot escape them – the nitpickers, absolutists, and sticklers. The tedious tribes of this is how we do it, and that is how it’s done. Rules are created to gain control and uniformity, and we follow them to maintain order and balance. With writing, as with jazz, you can’t break the rules until you …
We are saturated with self-serving marketing masquerading as thought leadership. It’s a game of mirrors, recasting light and misdirecting attention. But illumination is always strongest at its source.
At its core, writing is about connection – our goals are to educate, persuade, or entertain. Consider the moments that have moved you. Write the words you’d want to read.
