From Movement to Racket: Can Nonprofits Avoid Hoffer’s Trap
Eric Hoffer once wrote that every great cause begins as a movement, turns into a business, and eventually becomes a racket. The line is sharp enough to…
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Contentment vs. Fulfillment: Why Being and Becoming Are Not the Same
Fulfillment, if it is to be understood in any serious way, must be distinguished from the more fleeting states of pleasure or contentment. Pleasure is transient, contentment…
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How Time Co-ops are Similar to SUSU – but different
A time cooperative can be understood in the same spirit as the long tradition of SUSU, though the type of exchange is different. In SUSU, people strengthen…
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Why the Wealthiest People Aren’t the Ones Who Keep the Most
We grow up under the spell of numbers. Numbers in bank accounts, numbers on price tags, numbers that are supposed to tell us whether we are succeeding…
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Our Only Real Job in Life: Help When You Can, Do No Harm When You Can’t
The world is not on fire so much as it is smoldering in quiet places. If you look closely, you can see it. A slow curling of…
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The Art of Not Getting Around to It
They say, “Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?” And by “they,” I assume they mean the same people who alphabetize their sock drawers…
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Don’t Settle: Why We Must Chase Perfection to Build a Better World
There’s a tragedy in how mindlessly the days pass now. We get up. We check our phones. We pour our coffee. We trudge off to work, to…
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The Truth About Success: Why Hard Work and Sacrifice Still Matter
Nothing worth having ever comes easily. That phrase just sits there like a rock, weather-worn and unmoved, immune to trends and the latest self-help advice. You won’t…
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It Can’t Go On Forever (And Other Encouraging Thoughts)
There’s something reassuring about Stein’s Law, which says, quite simply, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” It’s the sort of logic that should be…
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Level the Playing Field, Not the Players
When I was ten, I lost the spelling bee to a kid named Jeremy, who once stapled his own finger to a vocabulary worksheet. He wasn’t trying…