I’ve read a lot of cheesy business/self-help books, and most of them have the same “discover yourself first, then take action” message. The writers are very heavy on the former, and give very unhelpful guidance on the latter. The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter by Meg Jay does not fall into that trap, and instead, [...]

When you travel, do you return to familiar places or opt for somewhere you’ve never been? Last month I had the opportunity to go back to Germany, where I used to live. The conference I attended was in Stuttgart, which is where I spent a year studying in college. When I decided to spend an [...]

Humans have evolved for conditions in the African savanna. Biologically, we are most suited to living the lifestyle of the forager or hunter-gatherer. In Steven Pinker’s book, How the Mind Works, Pinker does a deep dive into the human brain from an evolutionary perspective. He covers a wide range of topics from visual information processing [...]

Today I’m flying to Germany. For 15 years Germany was a HUGE part of my life. I lived there for almost four years. My BA, MAT and PhD are in German.  I taught German for several years. I read, spoke, and listened to German nearly every day. Guess how much time I’ve spent there since [...]

This past weekend I went up to visit NYC to visit a high school friend I haven’t seen in a few years. I’ve also never really explored NYC on my own (only short trips with the family) so I was excited to get away for the long weekend. I saw a few sights. I walked [...]

Cate and I were chatting the other day and we were trying to figure out what some of the themes of our next batch of TrekDek cards will be. One theme we came up with is “problem-solving.” We thought about all the times that travel has forced us to deal with setbacks on the fly [...]

I’m going abroad next month for work so I’m thinking about travel preparations. I admit it; my first thought was, and usually is, what am I going to wear? But then my mind automatically turned to cross-cultural preparation, because to me that’s as important as packing clothes. I never used to prepare much beyond buying [...]

I’m half-way through a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. I started reading it because I was fascinated by this New York Times article on French parenting which mentioned Mireille’s book and, also being in interested in diet and fitness, figured I’d learn something new from reading a book for American women about [...]

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” – Peter F. Drucker Dale and I talk a lot about why we travel. One obvious reason, of course, is that it’s fun. It’s enjoyable to get out of our routine and see, eat, hear, and do new things. [...]

I read two, very compelling books over the holidays. The first is the Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The book discusses the role of black swan events, events that are fundamentally unpredictable and have huge impacts, often negative. Nassim Taleb believes that the world is becoming increasingly complex and interconnected which makes [...]