Workshop Podcast

Check out the Tulsa Workshop Podcast. You can find it in itunes. Each week we’ll be releasing messages from the past workshop and giving some previews of what’s coming in 2007. The first episode features Max Lucado and Bob Russell.

Technical feedback is appreciated. I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to mixing audio (and a whole bunch of other stuff too). Better yet, if you’d be interested in helping us come up with a really tight sounding podcast, I’d love to hear from you.

Update: I’ve published the second episode. I found a great audio editor online that I think may end up making me look like I know what I’m doing.

Proof of Fish

I haven’t been around the computer much in the past few days.

Here’s a picture proving that I caught some fish on my fishing trip in British Columbia in July.

Vital Friends

One of my vital friends recently gave me a copy of the book Vital Friends by Tom Rath. It’s an easy read. It feels like it was article that was expanded into a book (barely). It’s got some great insights about friendship. Here are a few nuggets.

During our teenage years, we spend nearly one-third of our time with our friends. For the rest of our lives, the average time spent with friends is less that 10%

If your best friend has a healthy diet, you are five times more likely to have a healthy diet yourself.

Friendships are not designed to be well-rounded; 83% of the people we have studied report that they bring different strengths to the relationship than their best friend does. This is why it’s so damaging when another person focuses on what we do not bring to the friendship. . . We should not expect any of our friends to be good at everything. This “rounding error” can poison the very best friendships and marriages.

Without a best friend at work, the chances of being engaged in your job are 1 in 12.

The Stolen Child

Looking for some late summer reading?

Check out The Stolen Child.

It’s been called a fairy tale for adults. I finished it on Saturday and the story has stayed with me the way good stories are supposed to.

Here’s the book description: Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, The Stolen Child is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his double.

On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelings-an unaging tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him away, name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a child, Aniday grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family he left behind. He also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land, as modern life encroaches upon both myth and nature.

In his place, the changelings leave a double, a boy who steals Henry?s life in the world. This new Henry Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his true identity from the Day family. But he can?t hide his extraordinary talent for the piano (a skill the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling performances prompt his father to suspect that the son he has raised is an imposter. As he ages the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his prodigy. Of a time when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday obsessively search for who they once were before they changed places in the world.

The Stolen Child is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search for identity. With just the right mix of fantasy and realism, Keith Donohue has created a bedtime story for adults and a literary fable of remarkable depth and strange delights.

Rick Reilly: Making Up for Lost Time

Sometimes Rick Reilly makes me laugh like crazy. Other times he makes me cry like a baby.This one does the latter.