In the middle of November, I gave a talk at TEDx Knoxville. My friend Alex Lavidge organized the event and invited me to speak. I was very excited and could still remember the first TED talk I had ever watched. It introduced me to William Kamkwamba, a boy from Malawi who used a book about […]
My friend Gregg let me borrow the Bloomgberg Businessweek edition celebrating the life of Steve Jobs. One Jobs quote from a 1996 Wired magazine interview struck me with its simplicity: “Creativity is just connecting things.†I think we often associate creativity with trying to dream up a new idea or piece together a solution to […]
When my soon-to-be best friend Hunter moved into the house three doors down, we both acquired the brother that neither of us had. We found a partner in crime. When the Little Harpeth River flooded in the late March and April, we would sneak the pool floats out of my garage and raft down the […]
Certain experiences mold us differently than we would perhaps have chosen. We don’t have the luxury of God’s power and perspective. We don’t have a hand in picking the people and manipulating the forces that will make us. While in our nascent state, we have no Olympian detachment that would enable us to see our […]
My friend David invited me to a private dove hunt on the opening day of dove season, September 1. I haven’t gone dove hunting in fifteen years. The last time I tried to bring down one of those aerial acrobats, I need a note signed by my parents to get out of school. My sunscreen […]
I borrowed some material from Melting Chocolate Kettles to end this post, so for those of you who haven’t read the book, here’s the thesis of the chapter on Place: Set up a creative habitat where actual, raw production can happen on a consistent basis. Choose a place to make a mess then clean it […]
My wife Megan has a gift for “nesting,†and she was the one who introduced me to this term, which I take to mean a knack for making a place inviting and comfortable. At the end of July, we moved into a new house, and within a few days, she had found a place in […]
On June 23, I gave my first Pecha Kucha presentation at Knoxville Museum of Art. You may be wondering, “What is Pecha Kucha?†It sounds illegal. It sounds like it may cause disfigurement, or even death, without immediate medical attention. In reality, the term is Japanese and denotes the sound of conversation, similar to “chit […]
When we were growing up, my two sisters and I weren’t allowed to watch several television shows. Married with Children had bad language and crass humor. The Simpsons was a little too irreverent for my parents’ taste. Friends had all the wrong goodies: promiscuity, children out of wedlock, divorce, profanity, a casual attitude toward pornography, […]
Whenever I hear the word “courage,†what comes to mind is an orange, sticky-looking substance in a metal tin—orange sherbert. For years, I thought this is what The Wizard of Oz gave to the Cowardly Lion to fix his cowardice. After a little snooping around in the Google Images vault, I discovered that he really […]
