1: On July 2nd, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Britain.
The following day, July 3rd, final revisions to Thomas Jefferson’s draft of The Declaration of Independence were agreed to.
Which brings the story to the 4th of July, 1776.
“In later years the excessive summer heat of Philadelphia would frequently figure in accounts of Thursday, July 4, 1776,” David McCullough writes in his … continue reading
1: “Monday, July 1st, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break,” David McCullough writes in his book John Adams.
John Adams, then one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress, was up before sunrise.
Early that morning, he wrote a long letter to Archibald Bulloch, the new president of Georgia: “This morning is assigned … continue reading
1: “To create anything of value—whether it’s a product, a company, a society, or a life,” Ron Shaich writes in his powerful book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, “we must push through our default settings.”
How do we do that?
“By living consciously and deliberately, by making the hard choices, and by using tools … to discover what will really matter, again and again.”… continue reading
“Vision without action is merely a dream.” -Japanese proverb
1: “To win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,” President John F. Kennedy said to a joint session of Congress in 1961.
Now that’s a bold vision.
But vision by itself isn’t enough. A powerful strategy is required to bring a bold vision to life.
“During his speech that day he not only … continue reading
1: Yesterday, we looked at the stunning increase in prosperity over the past 200 years.
“The story of the growth of prosperity in human history is close to: nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . (repeat for a few thousand years) . . . boom!” writes Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Imagine a standard nine-inch pie … continue reading
Much of the discussion around poverty centers on who is to blame.
“Few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators,” writes Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”
Yet “discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.”
Wrong question, Steven believes.
Poverty “needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default … continue reading
