Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
An insightful, feel-good blog about work, life, and the elusive balance between the two, by career counselor, award-winning resume writer, and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
We’d be a lot better off if the people with microphones would commit to saying positive things more often.
Oh, the progress we’d make if we chose to CREATE rather than CRITIQUE!
It’s okay to not like something.
But does that dislike have to be said out loud, into a… Read more...
I got lucky. Or the opposite.
Whatever… I’ve created a mechanism that draws people to me who are in a dilemma and ready for something new.
And they ask me with the passion and wonder of a child shouting to the ocean,
“What should I do?”
What a gift: to be brou… Read more...
I’m a pretty calm dude. I’ve always been this way, but it’s a talent I become more and more proud of as and enter middle age.
Life is hard. Adults have more responsibilities than time, more aspirations than years on a calendar. There’s always a good reason … Read more...
A creative writing professor once told me, “If you’re bored with one of your characters, try giving ’em a beard.” It became a thing. When something was off in one of our stories, he’d slam the paper down and yell out “Give ’em a beard!… Read more...
Epiphanies can be deceiving.
Once we figure out the way – Eureka! I’ve found it! – we tend to disregard all other paths. It feels good for a while but, in the fog of euphoria, we stop looking around. Holding tightly to our compass, we become crotchety.
Simply by t… Read more...
In 9th grade, I was generously forced into journaling by my English teacher. In college, I eventually found my way into a short-fiction class, and was sold. I wrote all the time, was working on stories all the time, daydreaming about my characters, while real-world people talked … Read more...
Our instinct is to resent constraints.
All of us struggle with telling our life’s story on a single page. And all of us wish we had more hours in the day…
Under such constraints, we often give up and then blame these limitations for our failure.
But if you can put all th… Read more...
Something that’s always bugged me: name prefixes.
Why is it that doctors and politicians and judges are allowed to change their prefixes but no one else is?
I know these folks work hard — extremely hard — but so do CEOs and sanitation workers. I know that becoming… Read more...
On my way to drop off my daughter at school, sometimes I catch a funny radio segment on the Marcus & Sandy show called “Second Date Update.”
Marcus and Sandy call up someone who ceased communication with another person after a first date and then they ask that some… Read more...
I like to take notes in a blank sketchbook. I’ve always hated lines and boxes, and writing by hand is more fluid… (see what I did there?).
My notes are thought fragments, shorthand, just enough to remind me what I was thinking.
And in this process, I’ve developed… Read more...