Can you think of a time when you learned something so obvious you couldn’t figure out why anyone had to explain it to you? That’s how it is with the lesson behind The Motive by Patrick Lencioni, a book recommended to me by our soon-to-be-retired Fire Chief Tracy Fox. How often do we associate our job…
Here’s a riddle for you. I have thousands of stories but very few floors. Bring back what I give you and you can take more. Of course, you know that most public libraries are only a few floors high, but they contain a seemingly endless supply of stories in the pages of their books. When…
The Andy Griffith Show ran for eight seasons on American television in the 1960s, and it has provided generations of viewers with a plethora of life lessons spoken softly in Andy’s Southern drawl and lived out in the peaceful community of Mayberry, North Carolina. Many modern small cities, particularly in the Southern United States, seek…
As a kid, I had a little leather pouch that I had taken from my mom, who picked it up on a field trip to a Native American reservation when she was a kid. Inside it, I kept a very small but very interesting coin collection – at least for a kid. I never met…
“Listen my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…” Thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, most of us know the story of Paul Revere riding to warn the colonists that the British troops were beginning their invasion of the American colonies. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell tells us that Paul…
There are so many things we think about when we think about American Independence Day. If you close your eyes and draw a picture in your mind of all the words that you associate with July 4th, there are probably fireworks, hotdogs, baseball, and family gatherings with everyone dressed in some form of red, white,…