Alan C. Fox's Blog, page 18

I have learned a great deal in my life by listening to the suggestions and wisdom of others.

About thirty-five years ago I had the opportunity to study with Dr. Paul Ware, a psychiatrist in Shreveport, Louisiana. For an entire week, together with four or five other students, I followed Paul around to his lectures, his meetings, and his visits to a psychiatric hospital. At the end of our five days of training he allocated to each of us one hour of his time to discuss privately anything we had...

Years ago, I returned from vacation and couldn’t find my keys. I had hidden them somewhere, but didn’t remember where. I couldn’t use my car, unlock the front door to my office, or open my storage unit.

Like those hidden keys, most people have hidden agendas.

An agenda is an intention to make something you desire happen, or prevent something from happening that you want to avoid. “I want string beans for dinner” is a statement of what I want. “I don’t want to talk about that now” is a stateme...

I have heard it said that when you are dying you remember the moments, not the hours or the days, of your life.

I’m still very much alive, enjoying almost every moment, and I’ve been thinking about a few of the perfect moments in my life. I don’t remember them all, and a flawless moment is as rare as a flawless diamond, but here are some of those moments in the order I remember them.

Talking with my mother in the kitchen when I was five or six as she cooked dinner for the family. The time we...

I’m a numbers guy, so, as much as possible, I like to reduce my life to numbers. They are reliable (two is always two), though probably more comforting to me than they should be. As a computer programmer reminded me years ago, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

I also like to put my relationships into categories and then assign numbers to each category. My scale ranges from 1 for awful to 10 for perfect.

For example, I had a relationship with a coin dealer for many years. In the entertainment categor...

Good advice can come from unusual places.

Last week my friends Joe and Barbara sponsored a charitable fund-raising event at a Comedy Club in Hermosa Beach, California, which, during rush hour, is a ninety-minute drive from my office. They were surprised that I showed up, but I like to support my friends.

Dinner at the Club was surprisingly excellent, and I laughed out loud at the four opening acts.

The headliner was a woman in her 50’s who started slow but finished fast. Toward the end of her...

There are times when a good memory is distinctly unhelpful. An example is my vacation to Antarctica in 2008, which now seems like a lifetime ago.

One year in advance I had chartered a ship and invited family and friends to join me. A few months before we left for the trip, the worldwide investment firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. What followed was either “The Great Recession” if you kept your job and home, or “The Second Great Depression” if you lost your job or your home. My busine...

Running your life is very much like running a business, and this blog contains ideas and stories from my own life to help you do exactly that—to live your life well.

When I was very young I knew that I was supposed to be a writer. I’m now seventy-six, and have taken a long detour to finally become who I’m supposed to be. Geoffrey Chaucer observed more than six hundred years ago that the craft of life takes long to learn, and Emily Dickinson added, more than four hundred years later, each day...

I began writing People Tools many years ago so I could share with others the behavioral insights that have helped me to achieve my goals and to live my dreams. Three books and hundreds of blog posts later, I still ask myself a question you too may occasionally ask yourself.

“How do I know which is the best tool to use in a given situation?”

The simple answer is, I don’t always know. I still have to experiment.

It has been my hope that you and every one of my readers will use people tools to l...

“Honey, do you like this dress?”

Danger! Danger! Rocky passage ahead!

For many reasons one of my strongest values is honesty, both in myself and others.

For many of the same reasons another of my strongest values is kindness, also in myself and others.

But what happens when these two ideals collide?

Any one of the following reactions to the question above might be entirely honest. I wouldn’t hesitate to immediately use either one of the first two. As for the rest, what do you think?

“That dre...

As a boy I spent countless nights with my flashlight, reading science fiction in bed under my covers. I was fourteen when I read a short story that has always stayed with me.

“A Little Bit of Oil.” took place on a spaceship conducting the third ten-year expedition to the nearest star. The first two voyages had failed as the four-person crew neared Earth. Each time the spacecraft had mysteriously disappeared and was never heard from again.

This third attempt was different. One crew member was...