There is a direct link between depth and difficulty. If you don’t believe me, take a stroll through the biography aisle at books a million. Deep stories are defined by it; shallow ones lack it.

The world is getting faster and we only have two options: get left behind or become stressed out. I found a solution recently in the concept of “personal density“ as introduced by Alan Jacobs.

No matter what career you find yourself in, odds are, at the core, you are an educator.

You educate employees to your company’s process, or you educate staff when they need help, or you educate customers when they are trying to find the right product.

Imagine yourself at war, on the front lines, and you’ve just heard the report that a long range missile has been launched straight at your base. The anti-air gunners run to their places while everyone else runs to theirs. You break your neck to hurry up and wait.

Kids learn at the pace of a rocket, their world constantly changing and expanding, but eventually, as they become adults, tragically, that slows down.

There are a thousand songs telling us that love is a mystery, but I would say love is clear as a bell compared to the human heart. We are defined by what we love and value, and those are often incredibly hard to perceive.

There are lizards everywhere. When you are walking down the sidewalk downtown it’s like parting the Red Sea with all the scampering as they clear the way.

None of us set out to be copouts, but somewhere along the line, sometimes people lose touch with reality. We can say we care about solutions, about real positive change, but if we refuse to get beneath the surface, we prove ourselves Mega-Fibbers.

There are only two life forms. If you were to make a bar chart out of them, ranked by number of occurrences, one would be as tall as the Empire State Building and the other as tall as an ant, lying flat on his back, with his legs curled in.

Whatever you sell them on is what you will keep them with.

We drink our own kool-aid: we believe our own press. Especially about our accomplishments, we have trouble distinguishing fiction from reality, but in reality, we have work to do.

Businesses spend millions of dollars on advertisements trying to earn your trust. But trust can’t be bought, only familiarity can be bought. And familiarity is not trust.

The columnist is in a prickly place. He’s breaking the silence regularly and presenting himself before the judgement and scrutiny of the world, and he does so because he thinks it’s a good idea.

I want to take the next two weeks and provide a thorough thank you to everyone involved in this column. It’s been almost a year now, and time would pass me by before I take the chance to slow it down and express my gratitude.

“Help us, God, to live in the abundance for which you made us, and to bring that abundance to every part of your world.” So ends the preamble to the most profound creed of Christian business I’ve ever encountered.

Imagine you’re at dinner and you overhear a middle-aged couple talking about their retirement and the end of times. You tune them out, trying to focus on your steak dinner, but suddenly the man comes up to you and says, “Excuse me, we are having a debate, and I wonder if you will help us settle it. Do you know where we are all headed?”

Life is fun—it’s a blast!—full of joy and balloons, wonder and amazement, cotton candy and hot dogs. But it is also full of risk, and if you don’t know how to manage risk, it can ruin you.

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.”

At what point does Jeff Bezos say he has enough money, or Tiger Woods enough wins, or Jay Leno enough cars? Or at what point does the power-hungry politician or preacher say he has enough power?

I once read that home is the place where we are treated the best, but grumble the most. I wonder if the same could be applied to our offices, and what we can do to tone it down.