Monthly Archives: March 2015

You Never Know How Strong You Are…

“You never know how strong you are…until being strong is the only choice you have.” Some days you come to the end of your day feeling like you have taken all you can take…you have given all you have to give…dealt with all you can possibly deal with…you literally feel like you are at the […]

True Friends

“Good friends care for each other…close friends understand each other, but TRUE FRIENDS stay forever…beyond words, beyond distance, beyond time…!” Many of us have friends in our lives over the years. Some friends we make as children and then lose contact as we grow older. Other friends we make as adults and stay in touch […]

Don’t Lose Hope. You Never Know What Tomorrow May Bring. (Forbes Article)

“We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” –Martin Luther King Jr. History is full of stories about people who came into hard times, lost hope, and gave up. We rarely come to learn what would have happened with these individuals if they had given up. We are left to wonder […]

Be A Force For Good

“We can all be a force for good if we have the desire.” – Gail Miller Tonight I attended the Giant in Our City Awards dinner where the award was giving to an amazing woman, Gail Miller. Gail is someone who has spent her life doing good things for others. She has truly made a […]

A Laugh A Day Keeps the Doctor Away

We’ve all heard the saying that Laughter is the Best Medicine, so when I came home from work tonight feeling a cold starting to come on I decided I needed to do two things: 1. Drink some Nyquil, and 2. find some funny quotes to make me laugh. I don’t think anyone who has ever […]

The Four C’s:  Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy

“Somehow I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you […]

See How Far You’ve Come

It was exactly three years ago today that I signed the final papers to sell my company. As I look back over the last three years I am blown away at how much has happened since then. I transitioned out of my old company, I launched REES Capital (my angel investment firm), got our charity […]

Have Courage and Be Kind

That phrase, “Have Courage and Be Kind” is repeated multiple times throughout the new movie Cinderella (the real life remake of the cartoon classic).  It was advice given to Cinderella as a small child by her real mother before her real mother passed away.  Today in a meeting someone reminded me again of the phrase […]

Find something you’re passionate about

“If you can’t figure out your purpose, figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right into your purpose.” We can all find something we are passionate about in life. And hopefully we have many things we are passionate about. The key is to figure out what they are. Some we come to […]

An optimist’s way of viewing one step forward and one step back

“Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it’s more like a cha-cha.” That may just be one of my favorite quotes I have heard in a while. Maybe because it incorporates being optimistic and dancing, and everyone who knows me knows how much my […]

The Do’s And Don’ts of Creativity (Forbes Article)

“Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.” – Albert Einstein Creativity is one of the most intrinsically rewarding endeavors we engage in.  Creativity requires a combination of innovation, inspiration, and a tremendous amount of hard work. It allows us to explore both the wondrous potential and […]

Go To Bed and Get A Good Night’s Sleep, Tomorrow Will Be Better

Today was a long, busy, stressful day, and it was a Monday which always feels a little more stressful than the rest of the days of the week for some reason…perhaps that’s because we put everything out of our minds in order to enjoy our weekends and then Monday morning we are forced to deal […]

Getting Your Life Affairs in Order

So often in life we get incredibly busy to the point that we are literally only able to handle the new things coming at us each day, with time sensitive items getting first priority, rarely even getting to the list of items in second priority, and just forget about anything down in the third priority […]

WE Determine Our Future

I have been writing daily blogs five days a week for over 4 ½ years without missing a single day.  There have been times when I was really sick but I still wrote my blogs because I had promised I wouldn’t miss a single day. Back in 2011, my daughter Ashley, who was 15 at […]

What Will We Wish We Had Done?

On our deathbed when we look back at our life, what will we wish we had done? It’s a questions we have all probably heard being posed before but when is the last time you actually stopped and tried to think about what your own answer would be. Will we wish we had worked more […]

When You Go Into The World Hold Hands and Stick Together

Sometimes advice is so great you just have to share it with everyone.  Robert Fulghum wrote the book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten  (Villard Books: New York, 1990). The following excerpts are from pages 6-7 and they contain the most simple, yet powerful advice. I love that this advice applies to all of […]

People Who Do Bad Things

There are people in this world who do bad things. Many, if not all of us, have been on the receiving end or dealt with people who have done bad things that have hurt us. The hope is that over time, as we get older and wiser, that we are far more careful in our […]

It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving

Every Sunday when we sit down for our family dinner we have a tradition where we go around the dinner table and as we are eating each person in the family shares with the rest of us what they learned that day or week. We have done this since the time my children were little […]

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

“If at first you don’t succeed, do it like your mother told you.” We all remember the famous mom advice we got as kids:  Wear a coat, brush your teeth, look both ways before you cross the street, put on sunscreen, don’t take candy from strangers…..  We would roll our eyes and grumble under our […]

One of the greatest things about being an adult…

 “One of the greatest things about being an adult is the feeling of euphoria when you get to change into pajamas.”   SO TRUE!!!!  Today was possibly one of the longest days I have had in a very, very long time. It actually started just after midnight last night when I found myself still awake, working […]

Remember Who You Are And What You Stand For (Forbes Article)

“All through my growing up years as I would run out the door of our home, my mother would yell the phrase “Remember who you are and what you stand for”.  I would guess I have heard that phrase literally thousands of times as a child.  Most days she said it I would roll my […]

The Rules We Learned At Recess

I loved recess as a little kid. I loved being out on the field running around with the sun shining. Now that  I am an adult I can look back and see that not only was recess a time for fun, it was also a teaching ground full of life lessons that would apply to […]

The Characteristics Of A True Leader (Forbes Article)

Every one of us is a leader in our own right. Whether we lead an entire company, or a team of people, or a group of friends, or our families, or just ourselves…we are all leaders in some form or fashion. Whatever size our circle of influence may be today, if we work to improve […]