Articles

The day stress poured down on me. Literally. 🪜 March 1998. The first warm day in a long time. My wife Beth and I decide to take our two-year-old Kenny out to play in the yard. When we get out there I tell Beth I’m going to unclog our front gutter. All winter long the...

📖 Story: Jet Skis at 50 (From my book "Fry Your Chickens!") (From my book Fry Your Chickens!) It’s a warm day in July. We’re on our annual South Carolina family vacation. I’m sharing a beach towel with my wife. I’d recently hit a milestone birthday. The big 5-0. Five...

I asked ChatGPT to channel Simon Cowell and give me a brutally honest review of my speaking career — specifically how I stack up among Ohio’s top humorous keynote speakers. The feedback? Let’s just say it was equal parts inspiring and... slightly painful. Here’s how...

How I turned a game show loss into one of the most valuable lessons (and keynotes) of my life. Senior year of high school, I was on our quiz team. We weren’t just answering questions in a classroom — we were competing on a televised academic tournament out of Toledo,...

How one chicken nearly ruined camp—and how I fried him instead. This past week, I was at Camp Friedlander with our Scout troop. Tent pitched by a lake. Nestled in the woods. It should’ve been peak relaxation. But on Day One, I heard him. At first, I listened. I found...

AI isn’t the problem. The way we use it is. Every few weeks, someone declares that AI is ruining our ability to think. “Students don’t learn to write anymore!”“People just copy/paste ChatGPT answers!”“We're outsourcing our brains to bots!” One article even blamed...

In 2023, I made a big decision: I would retire from corporate life on March 31, 2024. But the chickens had other plans. They whispered doubts like: "You’re giving up a steady paycheck?" "What if no one wants to hire you?" "You’re walking away from security—you’re...

Most mornings used to start with Chicken Little screaming in my head—’You’re behind! The sky is falling!’ I was stressed before I even had coffee. So I created a morning routine that shuts those chickens up. I call it ABCD: Affirmations, Bible, Coffee, and Dogs. It’s simple, repeatable, and backed by science. A 2012 study found that just three minutes of negative news in the morning made people 27% more likely to report a bad day. Want to flip that script? Start your day with intention—and win the whole thing.

The adventure was supposed to begin smoothly on May 6. Fly to Boston, grab dinner at Legal Sea Foods during our layover, then head to Amsterdam for a week of keynotes and vacation. But as Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”...