This post returns today with high hopes of deep sixing the non-summit. However, it knows it can’t go it alone. Please help. Instead of pushing procrastination, let’s make sure that the only thing non-summits are pushing is daisies. A summit is the highest of the high. It is the top of a mountain. The apex. The peak. The zenith. If it is a summit meeting, it is a meeting of individuals at the peak. Think Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin during WWII. If you’ve been following this blog, you know my feelings about the trending use of the word summit to…

It’s back to school time, which means I’m back to yelling at my wall because I don’t like yelling at people. Every August, as freshman start moving into dormitories, the last minute phone calls and e-mails from campus bookstores start flying into Black Irish Books.

[Have you ever written something that included numbers and then wondered how those numbers played out? This is one of those for me. This post hit March 25, 2011. Apple is now minus Scott Forstall. Scott Forstall is now plus several Tony Awards. On Twitter, Scott Forstall is plus 8 tweets and still following Conan O’Brien. When this article hit, Conan O’Brien was minus “The Tonight Show” and about six months into being plus “Conan.” He’s now plus the title once held by David Letterman, of being the “the longest tenured late-night host on television.” And he did it in less than…

I’m a few years and thousands of pages into a project—and am starting over. I had an “all is lost moment.” It hit around the time Steve published his first “From the Trenches” article. I cried. I sulked. I said something shitty to my husband. I thought my world was falling apart—that everything that could go wrong had, or did, or soon would. I was wrong. I’m alive. I’m working. I’m healthy. Most important: My kids and husband are healthy and doing their amazing things. What helped me hurdle the moment? Steve #2. In his “Resistance at the Ph.D. Level” article,…

I have no tears left to cry nor emotions to feel. Instead of the heart keeping beat, the pounding in the gut plays metronome, a solid BOOM, BOOM, BOOM walloping the soul. It doesn’t hurt, but Pain has numbed me. I want to cry. I want to scream. I want to be back in my childhood room having a terrible two’s temper tantrum. I want to throw every stuffed animal, and book, and everything else I can get my hands on against the wall. But I can’t. I’m an adult. I have kids. I have a husband. I have work.…

Have you ever experienced a lightning strike when reading a book, listening to a song, or staring at a painting? That thing that’s been hanging in the background emerges with a clear path ahead of it. You know what to do—how to paint that portrait, how to sing that song, how to frame that book. It’s as if all the ideas in the universe came together at that moment to clear the way for one big idea—an idea that relied on you being in that exact place and time. This line from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon fueled a…

(In 2010 we ran the interview below with General Samuel Vaughan Wilson. In the years that followed, I found myself sitting on General Sam’s front porch, listening to his stories and wandering through the fields and woods surrounding his home. His obituary in the Washington Post this past week shared highlights of his military and intel career. While I spent days listening to stories from those periods of his life, to me he will always be more teacher than soldier or “spymaster.” He believed in, and devoted his life to, his country, and then gave every lesson he learned to the generations that followed. I…

Numbers are concrete. Unless they’re being manipulated by a slug, I don’t look at “2” and wonder if it is really “4.” I know that the absolute value of 2—whether it has a negative sign in front of it or not—is still 2, because numbers are ultimately about distance. Both 2 and -2 take up two spaces on the number line, whether I’m moving forward or backward.

A baseball hit me in the face. The short story: I was at a baseball game when a player hit a ball, the ball hit a guardrail, and then the ball hit my face. Every experience in life is spooled on a loop, so as the Camden Yards staff hovered to make sure an ice pack was all I needed, I wondered which loop I was existing in at that moment. Why did this happened? Of all the people at the game, why me? What had I missed? Why was I in that loop? Why not the loop of the…

I flew on Alaska Airlines this week. Before the flight took off, I witnessed a first. The pilot joined the passengers at the gate to announce a flight delay. No microphone. No airline staff at his side. Just him. His voice. His proactive communication.