As a writer, you have control: You can play around with your own thoughts and when you find those insufficient, draw upon others': their wisdom, their humor, their failings.

Being sleep-derived not only hurts you at work, it hurts your health. You need to value yourself enough to have good sleep hygiene.

I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.

A half-hour before bedtime, I remind myself that I now deserve to prepare myself for a good night's sleep. You can't focus on your work if you're sleep-deprived even if you have a fascinating job.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

I'm one of the many people for whom coffee helps but often, inattention is a symptom of something else: for example, that you're not getting six to eight hours of sleep.

The lack of crispness comes significantly from a societal change in what's valued: a replacement of bold individual initiative with collaboration, consensus, teamwork etc. All that team-involved decision-making often leads to tepid solutions and a slow-moving organization.