by Mark O'Brien | Jul 23, 2015
On Tuesday night, I was the featured speaker at the annual meeting of Literacy Volunteers Valley Shore (LVVS, about which I wrote here). This may suggest two things about LVVS: Their character judgment is deeply suspect and their speaker pool is perilously shallow if...
by Mark O'Brien | Jul 22, 2015
Every once in a while, you happen onto something that makes you appreciate just how hard life can be. On those occasions, you realize how much more sympathetic you can be, how much more helpful you can be, and how much better you can make other people feel as they...
by Mark O'Brien | Jul 21, 2015
I came across a book review in The Financial Times over the past weekend in which the author, Julian Baggini, finding a common thread running through the three books he reviewed, wrote something arresting — something that directly contradicts the popular and...
by Mark O'Brien | Jul 20, 2015
On the day I searched Amazon for books on work/life balance, there were 1,702 results returned. I’ll bet if I’d conducted the same search the next day, there would have been more. That made me wonder: If all of the employees who read these books practice...
by Mark O'Brien | Jul 17, 2015
The other day, as I was giving my cat, Sammy, his usual evening repast, which consists of a half-can of wet food (he snacks on dry food all day), he said, “Just give me the whole shebang.” The next day, as I was repeating the process, he said, “Just...
by Mark O'Brien | Jul 16, 2015
In an effort to keep my horizons as broad as possible, I’ve been taking correspondence courses in Women’s Fashion from the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM). To say it’s been fascinating would be understatement bordering on the obscene. Among other...
