A year ago I wrote about Elliot Uzelac who had coached college football for 40 years with stops at Michigan, Ohio State, Colorado and Maryland. At age 74, he set aside retirement to become head football coach at Benton Harbor High School in Michigan—a crippled program that that had endured 25 straight losing seasons and…
My son Phil passed away two years ago on September 30. Yesterday would have been his 40th birthday. He was a wonderful guy with a quick wit, big heart and a great sense of humor. He has been sorely missed by everyone who knew him. I feel very fortunate that the last words spoken between…
A friend of mine told me about this story which was posted on Facebook last March. Since then it has been shared more than 30,000 times and received more than 1,500 comments. Cesia Abigail is the 25-year-old owner of Abi’s Café, an El Salvadoran restaurant in Minneapolis. One day, a street person named Marcus walked…
Mike, a neighbor of mine, who lives on the street just north of me has been retired for some time. He takes his dog for long walks at least three times a day. Not long ago, I noticed that he was carrying a bag containing aluminum cans that he had picked up during his walk.…
My wife is the director of a foster care and adoption agency. Each year in September, this agency has a camp designed to bring foster and adoptive families together for a weekend of pure fun. Again this year, there were field games, hikes in the woods, hay rides, crafts, 1,400 water balloons and s’mores around…
In a recent column published in the Denver Business Journal, best-selling author Harvey Mackay shared some succinct nuggets of life advice that he’d come across during his very successful career. These nuggets are so dead-on that I’d like to share some of them with you. Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you…
Last Saturday I stopped at a restaurant to pick up some lunch for my wife and myself. While I was waiting for the food to be prepared, I noticed a party that was occupying several tables. They were excited, smiling and doting over a very young child that was in a child carrier. They snapped…
My oldest daughter sent me a recent article from Today.com. It was about how the Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas went from giving its kindergarten and first-grade classes one twenty-minute recess per day to four fifteen-minute recesses per day. At first some of the teachers were skeptical. As Donna McBride, a first-grade…
An article by Sue Shellenbarger, which recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal, pointed out an interesting paradoxical fact: “When someone is getting stressed out, one of the least effective (and perhaps most annoying) things to say is ‘Relax.’” She goes on to say that while the person communicating this directive may have the best…
A friend of mine posted an Instagram photo on Facebook which contained the following message: 3 Ways to Fail at Everything in Life Blame all your problems on others. Complain about everything. Not be grateful. People who live by the above three principles spend most of their time making themselves and everyone around miserable. These…