“I am practicing being kind over being right” – Matthew Quick, Silver Linings Playbook I was on a trip to visit friends in Northern California two years ago and was walking along a river near their house when a 20-pound rat crawled out of the water in front of me. I quickly ran through the following options: Am I on…...

“Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi Standing in line at the Hunger Games, I mean, Costco the other day, I overheard a conversation in which a gentleman had decided to purchase a brand new printer primarily because it cost him less than it would to replace the ink in the…...

“Fear, left unchecked, can spread like a virus” – Lish McBride, Necromancing the Stone Turns out a virus can spread plenty of fear all by itself. After having spent the last few days at a long-planned and poorly attended conference, the only topic on anyone’s mind seemed to be avoiding contact at nearly all costs. Having already avoided flights to…...

“Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.” – Heraclitus Smart dude, that Heraclitus. Being exceptional in your character really is formed by moments, habits, and a dedication to trying to do things “right” in every moment. It’s…...

“JERAMI GRANT HAD FORTY-NINE POINTS TONIGHT!!!” I had just walked in the door, and knew I’d misheard her. I was sure I had something crazy in my ear. I wanted to ask my wife to repeat herself. I somehow encapsulated all of that response into something a little briefer: “HE WHAT????” The “what” had landed in a register I thought the…...

He thought he saw a Garden-door That opened with a key: He looked again, and found it was A Double Rule of Three: “And all its mystery,” he said, “Is clear as day to me.” -Lewis Carroll Friends, Denverites, Nuggets Nation… lend me your ears. No, really, just for the WKND. Er, weekend. I should have them back to you by…...

Do you believe in miracles? Let’s get back to that in just a second, and talk about church first… no, not like that. My family was pretty good about getting to church every Sunday in my youth, though I often felt like I wasn’t spending the other six days steering myself in the same direction I was being taught every weekend.…...

The best days of my soccer career had already come to an end, and I was now winding it up with regular stints on my collegiate club squad. We had a match upcoming with the club from Boulder, and I’d heard stories about their rock star left wing I’d be facing. Stories so impressive as to be hard to believe.…...

I was nine the first time I saw her, and all I knew was I had to have her… No, I wasn’t hormonal. Not yet, anyway. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even really thinking of her as a “her”. But I’d never wanted anything so badly in my less-than-3500-days on the planet. In return, she just stared at…...

A few weeks ago, I was standing in line at a killer deli not too far from me, and ordered their Italian Hero, called the Godmother. It was so tasty, I actually ate it in my car in the parking lot. That hero… did not have much of a journey. Ba dump bump. In the more classical sense, Joseph Campbell…...

This is crazy… This is crazy… This is crazy… – Clark Griswold There is no fool like a mid-life crisis fool. Thankfully, I am no fool. Except… As an ’80’s kid, I grew up with the illusion that a mid-life crisis had something vaguely to do with blondes and red convertibles. I wasn’t a huge fan of either, so I…...

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, it is the one that is most adaptable to change.” -Charles Darwin You’re reading this upside down, you know. You have been since before you actually learned how to read it. You were re-computing well before you were perambulating, let alone reading. The eyeballs you’re…...

The year before my wife and I were married, we took our first trip to Las Vegas. As we wandered through the lobby of our casino, we strolled past the Sports Book. I stood in amazement at one of the races on the board that day, where the horse at the bottom of the list stood at 100-1 odds. My…...

“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” – Dwayne Johnson “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” – Aldous Huxley At my first corporate gig, I arrived at the company just as they were signing their first trial contract with their…...

As I pulled into my driveway on Wednesday night, the Denver Nuggets were in the last two minutes of their game against the Orlando Magic, and the Nuggets had relinquished a pretty sizable lead after having come back from a similarly sizable deficit. It had been a roller coaster. But I’d primarily been paying attention to the stats of one…...

The business I was working for had a problem. A law had changed that required them to shift their model in a direction that looked to close down the business. At that point, their business made over 180 million dollars a year, and employed nearly a hundred people. A sudden demise was going to be painful all around. For many…...

I took a job a few years back where I had to follow the “rock star”, stepping into a role that the person before me had created. She had defined it, and it had come to exist because she had shown the company the difference she could make in doing it. Stepping in behind her felt like stepping in for…...

I have a feeling I’d not like playing games like Risk, Othello, or Settlers of Catan with Altitude’s Katy Winge, as I get the feeling taking over the world is a fairly simple matter for the media dynamo. I’m guessing that as she continues to add titles to her resume, having spent the last two Denver Nuggets games in the…...

Denver was a three-sport town before it was a two-sport town before it eventually became a four-sport town. And when it was a three-sport town in my childhood, I knew a fair bit about football, and even a little more about basketball, but I knew jack-all about the Colorado Rockies. No, the other ones, our hockey team. My five-foot-barely mom…...