No excuses

Florence Nightingale is credited with saying, ‘I attribute my success to one thing – I never gave or took an excuse.’ Attribution of the quote is repeated and may be thin. It doesn’t matter. The question still lands: this week, what excuse did...

Let them fail

The best gift you can give your kid is a skinned knee. Not because pain teaches. Because recovery does. The parent who blocks every fall raises a child who has never learned to stand back up. The leader who blocks every mistake raises a team that has never learned to...

The gap we notice

We don’t begrudge a leader who prospers. We begrudge the gap between their prosperity and ours. Eat last, and the team barely notices the difference. Eat first, and they notice everything....

The grind is the gift

We romanticize the result and forget the road that got us there. Parents know this. Ask one who is a few years past the hard years. Past the arguments and the ultimatums and the late nights, wondering if they were doing it right. There’s a sparkle in the eye...

Strangers don’t lie

Something shifts in a city when a team wins after 53 years. We don’t just celebrate the trophy. We talk to strangers. We make eye contact on the subway. We feel, briefly, as if we are part of something larger than our own ambitions. The New York Knicks...