Only 17 years-old, Booker T. Washington set out from Malden, West Virginia, and walked roughly 500 miles to the Hampton Institute in Virginia. He arrived penniless and unannounced, so the head teacher tested him…
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When Viktor Frankl walked out of Auschwitz in 1945, he owned nothing except a pair of borrowed boots and an idea: that “those who have a why to live can bear almost any how.”…
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Henry David Thoreau moved into his self-built cabin at Walden Pond in 1845, and he began by taking an inventory: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three…
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In 1921, a painfully shy Eleanor Roosevelt agreed—against every instinct—to stand before a New York women’s club and deliver her first public speech. Her hands shook so visibly that she gripped the podium to…
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Betty Smith’s 1943 classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn opens with eleven-year-old Francie Nolan lugging a sack of scrap metal and rags to the neighborhood junk dealer. The payout—pennies, never nickels—goes straight into the tin-can bank…
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Welcome to Ask Mike, a regular column on our blog where I give a friendly, but opinionated answer to reader questions. Today, I’ll be answering the following question: “What’s the Difference Between Rest and…
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In October 1915, Ernest Shackleton stood on the buckled deck of the Endurance as Antarctic ice crushed it into splinters. Stranded with twenty-seven men and no hope of rescue, he imposed a regimen so ordinary it…
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Benjamin Franklin began each dawn not with an invention, a speech, or a diplomatic cable, but with a blank page and six words: “What good shall I do today?” He was twenty-four, running a…
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In the winter of 1922, an unknown Ernest Hemingway sat in a rented garret near the Rue Mouffetard, staring at a handful of small French coins. Café breakfasts were off-limits; there was barely enough…
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Reaching mental inbox zero begins with admitting that the mind was never designed to be a filing cabinet. Treating every passing notion as something to house, categorize, or color-code turns consciousness into a claustrophobic office…
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All of life is one big tradeoff, or that’s the way it feels sometimes. When we choose to focus our energy and resources on one thing, it’s usually at the expense of another good…
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Note: This is a guest post by Chris Loper of Becoming Better Ten years ago, I’d finally had enough. After nearly 12 years of constant marijuana use and occasional binge drinking, something finally clicked in…
