Travel light into ’26
Preparing for a new year is a lot like packing for a journey. You look ahead at uncertainty and possibility, then decide what’s truly worth carrying. Here are five essentials for your 2026 adventures: Strong Boundaries: Bring the ability to say no without guilt. To pause before agreeing. To protect your energy as seriously as your calendar. Boundaries aren’t limitations—they’re structural integrity. They define what you stand for. Creative Stamina: The year ahead will demand
Rob Reiner
Every one of Rob Reiner’s films made me think more deeply and reflect more honestly on my own life, largely because they so often felt like a mirror of my own experiences. He was one of those rare directors whose work you watched because of him, not just the subject matter—like Spielberg, Scorsese, Ron Howard, Coppola, and Woody Allen. Most of all, I loved his movies for the way I felt when I left the theater—full of emotion, reflection, and sometimes, a quiet sense of wonder
Doubt Killer!
Doubt attacks facts. Facts kill doubt. Debilitating doubt—the kind that stalls your goals, derails your dreams, and fuels endless procrastination—doesn’t live in logic. It lives in that five-inch stretch of real estate between your ears. That space is your command center, your war room, your workshop, your studio, and your sanctuary. It’s where ideas are born, shaped, challenged… and sometimes sabotaged before they ever see daylight. Buddha taught that inside that high-priced
Noodling Toward Greatness
It’s a funny, happy-sounding word: noodle. Every time I hear it, I think of my mom’s Thanksgiving noodles—made entirely from scratch with a massive dash of love. They weren’t just a side dish; they sat proudly between the mashed potatoes and stuffing, holding their own at the table. And like any kid, I remember noodling them around my plate—noodling for the sake of it—long before I ever noodled with words, ideas, or business plans. As pro artists and ’treps, we’re always nood
Flooring it!
"Faster, faster, the lights are turnin' red…Life in the fast lane." How did we get so addicted to speed? The race to finish. The scramble to make a buck. The rush to capture a brilliant idea before it slips away. The urge to finally reach a fait accompli on the current project so we can jump-start the next one. Even our thinking is stuck in the fast lane—thinking while we eat, while we drive, while we brush our teeth. Thinking when we’re meditating. Thinking instead of sleepi
Where's the beauty?
Beauty comes with a big payoff—people are drawn to it like treps to coffee. You are. I am. We all are. And beauty isn’t just what we see—it’s what we feel. It’s that quiet pull, that sweet aroma that keeps us coming back for more. We’ll binge the album. Read the whole book. Buy the painting. Revisit our favorite actors. Return to the same dry cleaners, and tell our friends. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”The poet John Keats was right when he wrote that line. Beauty isn’
Creating beyond what works
With time, trial & error, patience, and persistence, what works often evolves into a winning formula. Yet what works can be a double edge sword. While it offers a viable option, it can also trick us into thinking we’re creating something new and different—when in reality, we’re just refreshing the same old screen, instead of daring to reboot. When challenges hit, the instinct is to lean on what “worked before.” We repeat the formula, copy the solution, stick to the routine. S