Good Works Start Somewhere

Can You Solve This Riddle? Most dreams fail not because of a lack of talent or drive, but because the dreamer can’t answer this one little riddle: “What are you doing?” It seems innocuous, but it’s anything but. It’s unrelenting. And an incorrect answer can cause the bravest of us to stumble. Thankfully, we can learn from inspirational leaders like Jesse Cole. You may know Jesse better as the guy who is always wearing a yellow tuxedo and owns the Savannah Bananas. After finishing another...

Defying Gravity Did you know that Stephen Schwartz, composer and lyricist of the hit musical Wicked, didn’t think the 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West, could effectively be made into a movie? Well, that’s at least what he told the president of Universal Pictures when he had to convince Universal to turn it into a musical first. Universal owned the rights to turn the book into a movie and a team of writers were already working on the second version of the...

Take a Breath Did you know that Arnold Schwarzenegger never auditioned for a role in Hollywood? Not for Conan the Barbarian (his breakout film), Twins (his most lucrative film), or The Terminator. In fact, James Cameron said on The Terminator set, “If we wouldn’t have had Schwarzenegger, then we couldn’t have done the movie, because only he sounded like a machine.” Studios weren’t eager to hire Schwarzenegger once he became the youngest person ever to win the Mr. Universe title. In fact, when...

The Price of Admission According to Jackie Robinson and those closest to him, when did he face the most stress in his life? It wasn’t breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball while facing ridicule from teammates and fans. When every time he was at the plate, he had to wonder whether the pitcher was going to throw directly at his head. When every at-bat, he had to carry a race's hopes on his shoulders. The most stressful time in his life wasn’t during his military service either....

Keep Looking, The Cheat Codes Are Out There Why did no one tell us that the rules change when we become 18? They told us we can vote (please go vote. If I can, you can, too). They told us we could join the military and open a bank account. But no one told us that the rules of the game of life drastically flip on their head. Before our 18th birthday, the path is crystal clear: advance to the next grade, like those before us, and always do our own work. Yet, after we become adults, the opposite...

When Nightmares Come True You are not safe. They’re coming to get you. Do you remember that nightmare you had? You know the one. Your heart’s pounding. Your blood pressure’s rising. You’re tossing and turning in your sleep. You wake up startled. You comfort yourself back to sleep. You tell yourself, “It’s just a dream.” Well, it’s never just a dream. Hundreds of years ago, on a night like tonight, a man had similar trepidations. “Thought that a person was hung & came back to life,” he...

Your Dream Doesn't Need a Diet How many dreams in life do we water down? We cross the line from heeding advice and collaborating to compromising everything that made the dream special to us in the first place. We barely recognize it anymore. It makes sense why we do it. Even more so when we are trying to do something we didn’t train our whole lives to accomplish. But if we have the faith to believe we were born to do something—or at least the courage to give it a try—why don’t we trust that...

Be Careful, Your Walls Are Talking Perhaps it’s not if our walls could talk but what they yearn to impart. Every building is telling a story. Some are boring. Others salacious. Some you can’t help but read over and over again. Next time you leave your house, you’ll see what I mean. Your nearest strip mall. An office park. They scream efficiency. Why inspire? Everyone else is doing this. Isn’t there a sweet comfort in conformity? Maybe for a moment. But what about after they’re gone? After the...

Watch Out for This Lie Is compromise really a fact of life? We can’t give up who we are—or worse, who we want to be—for an adage touted as truth without first doing our own research. Well, we know hardship, challenges, and obstacles—and maybe even the occasional failure—incessantly reveal themselves throughout human history. Our heroes faced their trials and we’re each wrestling with our own struggles. When there’s something so ubiquitous to humanity, like adversity, I believe there’s some...

A Paradox I Can't Stop Thinking About If you dance with the Devil in the details long enough, you’ll eventually find you’ve been dancing with God. We are mesmerized whenever we are wrapped in a tapestry of experiences that’s woven together with care. If you’ve seen the movie Get Out, you get it. While he was still writing for his Comedy Central show, Key & Peele, Jordan Peele was working on a thriller. For five years, he labored over every detail, offering easter eggs that we can only fully...