When famous stand-up comedians step onstage, they’re met with a wave of claps and cheers from the audience. This round of applause is the crowd’s way of pumping them with confidence. It’s almost like they’re saying, “I believe in you. I know you’re going to make me laugh tonight.” On the other hand, amateurs sometimes get a quieter greeting. They don’t want to bomb, and…
Have you ever wanted to change careers, go back to school, or move far away to start a new life? Maybe you were once excited by the idea of change but, as soon as you started taking the first steps, you started to doubt yourself. Your loved ones called you crazy. You realized the commitment would be more expensive than you originally thought. You got…
When you open Meera Lee Patel’s Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration, the first thing you see is a single sentence, neatly written in vibrant watercolors: Every answer is inside you. These five words serve as the backbone of Patel’s short, interactive journal, and set the stage for the prompts and inspiring messages that follow. The structure of the book is simple. One…
There is a high school in Chicago that does not give failing grades. Instead, when students do not meet the requirements to pass a class they’re taking, they receive the grade “Not Yet.” The reasoning is that failure is a kiss of death for personal growth; when people are told they have explicitly failed something, they believe the failure is permanent and that they failed…
