Your brain is an amazing instrument, capable of helping you achieve all kinds of great things – success, wealth, and love, to name a few. But there are times when your brain can be your worst enemy, sabotaging your dreams and turning you into something you do not really want to be.

Put simply, there are times when your brain wants the opposite of what you want, and unless you rise above its ancient programming, it will win.

Take fear, for example. Our brains keep us alive, keep us motivated, and keep us functioning with fear. Deep in our ancient brains is the fear center, called the amygdala. Through fear, the amygdala prevents us from doing things that can harm us, and it can push us forward to accomplish things because those accomplishments will alleviate fears we have about the future. A reasonable dose of fear, properly managed, is a good thing.

But our brains really don’t have any judgment about fear. As long as you’re willing to listen, your amygdala will keep scanning the world around you for things to be afraid of, pumping that information into your system, and magnifying it until it drowns out nearly everything else. The media know this: fear increases ratings. Marketers know this: as marketing expert Seth Godin has written, “Fear is a universal emotion, it’s viral and people will go to great lengths to make it go away.” Political scientists have shown conclusively that people vote for the person they think is most likely to deal effectively with their greatest immediate fears. 

During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt began turning the country around in his first inaugural address when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In fact, the full sentence he pronounced is even more pertinent: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Today, the growing presence of unreasoning fear is leading us all toward making unwise decisions in dealing with worries and risks, causing many of us to retreat at the very moment when we should – and could – be advancing. Exceptional leaders learn to understand and bypass unproductive fears, and to use fear’s energy to galvanize new breakthroughs while others are standing still or going backward.

Fear Today

Your brain’s amygdala has no dreams of a great future, no wishes for yourself and those you care about. It has no goals at all beyond the merest of survival instincts. When it hijacks your thoughts and actions, it is hijacking the best of what makes you you.

It is particularly capable of hijacking you because the hormones that the amygdala triggers actually improve the brain’s capacity to remember bad things. As one neuroscientist has written, “Fear is certainly the most effective way of gluing a memory in place.”

An awful emotional experience will be vividly encoded and remembered. Such traumatic memories last, and they are potent. To make matters worse, they don’t even have to be personal experiences, and they don’t even have to be real. Our brains make no distinction between things that happen to us, things that happen to others, and made-up things we might read in a novel or see in a television drama: imaginary evils. 

In times like today’s world, the amygdala sits on a throne in the cranium, ensconced as king. Meltdowns seem to be occurring right and left. Not just financial meltdowns, but imaginary ones, media and gossip driven, as people hear rumors, watch emotion thunder through the stock market, hunker down, take shelter, seek only safety, and pinch their visions of what they can accomplish and what their futures can bring. The more we see that around us, the more we are inclined to do the same ourselves – fear is contagious, viral.  And we are watching it hijack brains everywhere.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to be afraid of. I am saying that once the amygdala gets its way, we all are inclined to over-worry and overreact – by a factor of five or ten – to fear and to handle it in ways that will only make things worse. Which will make us more afraid . . . and so the downward spiral goes.

The wisest businesspeople and the most astute leaders know that those whose brains help them to achieve their biggest dreams don’t melt down when times are tough, they step up. Nelson Mandela clearly observed: “There is no passion to be found playing small⎯in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”  

Richard Branson, one of a handful of today’s greatest entrepreneurs, recently wrote, “Every economic downturn is an amazing opportunity to win far more customers and trust and market share…if you have the eyes to see the opportunities and the ingenuity to go capture them.”

Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn studies how entrepreneurs build successful brands; she recently wrote: “Brands offer key benefits – especially in times of trouble. But they don’t do this on command or on the spot. They do this as a result of ongoing investment [in leaders and teams and accelerated growth] and commitment. Given this, it makes good strategic sense … to pay careful attention to brand – not just your company but to yourself as a brand, your team and solutions as a brand – in the midst of turmoil and doubt.  But to do this you must innovate – in your message, in meeting your prospects where they are, not where they were even a few months ago, and more.  After all, most of one’s rivals are likely to be running away from brand. So there is competitive advantage to be had.”

Your company is a brand, and so are you. This is the time to continue building the brand people will look to for sound judgment and reasoned perspective from today forward in the years to come. 

Right Now

Right now your amygdala is almost certainly telling you not to not listen to what’s in this essay. It’s probably telling you, “Why you? Let them step up, let them take the risks, let them dream their crazy dreams – you and I will hang on to what we have and hope that it’s enough until things get back to normal.”  

Well, things might get back to normal – that’s always a possibility. And then, as Nancy Koehn suggests, how far will you be behind those who acted while you hid? And if things don’t get back to what we have considered normal, what then? What will you have learned about succeeding in a different world? What new ideas will you have tested, what new skills will you have developed, what forward movement will you have accomplished – what will you have learned about managing your brain rather than letting it manage you? And what will you have shown to your loved ones, your clients – and yourself – about not only about the kind of person you are but also the kind of person, and leader, you are capable of becoming?

These questions are, in fact, enduring. They lie behind the greatness of the words of Heraclitus: How one meets change reveals all.  And they appear in a hand-written note from Emerson in a Self-Reliance lecture he delivered in 1872: The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.  How exceptional is this life – and new story of success – you could shape in the midst of great change?

Advancing While Others Retreat

Just like Emerson, your brain is probably saying “Yes! Let’s act differently from habit and the crowd! Let’s create a better way to win during tough economic times and build a more exceptional future starting today…  No, wait!  Let’s hide out until this blows over! Yes. No. Yes. No…”  

But it’s not all or nothing.  And that’s what makes the brain a challenge: it thinks in binary terms: to be or not to be. That’s the way most animals think, in terms of binary either/or choices: fight this/flee that; eat this/don’t eat that; go here/don’t go there.

Humans have the unique genius to test new things in small ways, finding out what works and building on it, and seeing what doesn’t work and discarding it. Doing that honors rational fear by not going too far, at the same time that it challenges irrational fear by acting. It moves us, in uniquely human ways, toward our dreams instead of only away from our fears. It puts us squarely where we need to be, always, but particularly in an uncertain and scary time – in the laboratory of life, inventing solutions that will secure our best future.

It is a primary attribute of exceptional leaders that they expand while others are shrinking. They see opportunities where others perceive only threats; they raise others up where others are pushing them down; they stand tall when others are ducking. They do all that not with bluster or braggadocio, but with what can be called “quiet confidence”: a steady calm when the world is going sideways, backwards, or downward around them, which shows itself in communication that is genuine and deep, with compelling conviction and energy, from the heart, not just the head, connecting the near with the far.

The two general keys to accomplishing that kind of leadership are, as I have suggested, awareness and action: awareness that the brain has many ways of defeating its owner’s dreams, one of which is through the paralyzing power of fear; and action that puts the obstructive brain functions on notice: “I’m in charge, not you.”

Regarding awareness, the comedian Emo Phillips captured why it is so difficult. “I used to think my brain was the most wonderful organ in my body,” Phillips said, “until I realized what was telling me that.” It is hard, but not impossible, to separate who you are from what your brain is. It’s valuable to keep in mind what a leading brain theorist, Dr. Robert Ornstein of Stanford University, said: “The mind is a squadron of simpletons.”

 Each brain part has a specialized thing to do, and does it to the best of its ability, but it does only that, and it does it in isolation from everything else. It has no regard for your best interests, only for doing its small job. It’s up to you to be aware of what each of the “simpletons” is doing and manage their exuberance in the way that meets your needs, not theirs.

So the first essential strategy for keeping your brain parts working for you, and not just for themselves, is action.  Small clear new actions are best, linked across a longer time horizon, a year for example, and aligned with your highest and most exciting goals.  These kinds of innovative “pilot-tests,” as we call them in neuroscience, can be very powerful and sustainable, especially if you have a great mentor or team working with you along the way.

Second, if you want to raise energy and attitude, don’t wait for conditions to be just right – which they rarely are – first change behavior. In other words growth follows action which grows new positive attitude. And simple, clear pilot-tests build it fast and safe…

Such small actions can fit into anyone’s schedule without tearing a big hole in it. Third, they’re efficient: you can build on them quickly, or just as quickly you can toss them out and try something else. Big dreams without action are very pleasing to the amygdala, since in practice they are exactly the same as having no dreams at all – in both cases, nothing is ventured and so nothing is risked. That nothing is gained does not matter one tiny bit to the amygdala. 

Fear Is Just A Feeling

The second-century Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Fear, as I have said, can be very important and even productive, but nonetheless it is just your mind’s interpretation of the jingling and jangling of some neurons that have been excited by your amygdala. Listen to the warnings, but then make your own estimate of their meaning, and of the consequences to you of paying them too much heed. 

Then you can refute some other famous words, often attributed to the twentieth-century philosopher Vince Lombardi: “Fear makes cowards of us all.” Many of us, perhaps, but not all. 

What about you?

Deep within humans dwell those slumbering powers;
powers that would astonish them, that they never dreamed of possessing;
forces that would revolutionize their lives if aroused and put into action.- Orison Marden

For those who insist on clinging to traditional ways of looking at the world, change will continue to come so fast and in such unexpected forms that the future will no longer be a desirable place. But for those who are willing to move ahead with conscious awareness of the natural laws of change, the future offers unparalleled opportunity to reshape our lives, our organizations, and our world, into what we want. – George Land, Ph.D., Grow or Die

Today the United States finds itself engulfed in a financial crisis of stunning proportions. It all has seemed so sudden, as though one day there were a few dark clouds on the horizon and the next day we were bailing with all our might.

The magnitude of the crisis makes it almost impossible to fathom that it was, in fact, created one action, one decision, one person, one institution at a time. Each unrealistic mortgage resulted from one transaction among a buyer, a seller, and financer. Each unviable derivative instrument was created by one person or team at one institution, and sold to someone at another institution. Each regulatory decision was made, or not made, by one person or team of people at one agency or another. Each vote for or against a piece of legislation was cast by one individual; each action implementing the legislation was carried out by one person or one team of people.

Virtually nothing in life happens to change our behaviors in ways that measurably move us forward or upward in any other way than one choice, one action, at a time. Even in natural disasters, the scope of the damage is a function of what a series of individuals or teams of individuals did, day by day, over time to prepare, or not prepare, for the future. Economic bubbles may burst suddenly, just as storm waters may overtop levees suddenly, but the conditions for those events are created by patterns of individual action or inaction, decision or indecision.

It is the same with our lives and work, even if most people are not consciously aware of it. Not long ago I saw a bumper sticker that describes the downside of this phenomenon. “Inside every old person,” it read, “is a young person . . . wondering what the hell happened.”

Today is what yesterday has made it, and today is creating tomorrow, but the powerful reactionary parts of our brains don’t want us to concern ourselves with what tomorrow will be like, because doing that might cause us to change something — and the brain is, by hard-wired nature, against change.  Neuroscience shows we’re naturally inclined to “play small” – to settle for a short-term smaller win rather than investing in what we are capable of creating or winning across time.  Add today’s contagious economic fears and “playing small” becomes “paralyzed by thoughts of the future so I’m doing nothing future-oriented at all.”  

Offer people fifty dollars today or one hundred dollars a year from now, and most people will take the fifty dollars. There’s a name for that irrational preference: hyperbolic discounting. It comes from the fact that people exaggerate reasons why tomorrow is not a good time to get the money, whereas today is an excellent time for it. 

The Habit Trap

Our brains always prefer to focus on why now is all there is, and by devoting lots of energy and time worrying about today we effectively defer all actions – even the smallest of them – that could create a better tomorrow.  The brain ingeniously invents reasons why tomorrow can’t or shouldn’t be taken into consideration. That helps explain why people persist in habits that they know are going to kill them or cause them pain. In patients who have suffered debilitating heart problems severe enough to require surgery, for example, despite the clear understanding after surgery that death can result from failing to change their unhealthy habits, only one person in ten actually makes any lifestyle changes required for heart-healthy living! 

Dr. Edgar Miller, CEO of Johns Hopkins Hospital, declares, “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90 percent of them have not changed their lifestyle at all. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they don’t.” 

The more we sense that a change might alter our current habits and routines, the more tenaciously the brain implores us to hold onto those habits and routines and the less likely we are to see or seize possibilities for improvement. 

And so it happens that, as the great psychologist William James once wrote, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits – practical, emotional, and intellectual – systematically organized for our greatness or grief, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny.”

Wanting to is One Thing . . . Doing is Another

Exceptional leaders recognize that they can create the future, not just wake up in it one day and wonder either how lucky they were or, more likely, what the hell happened. They are not willing to be marionettes operated by strings made up of the mass of hard-wired habits that run their attitudes and reactions just beneath their awareness. They know that, in this sense, they must outwit their own brains, because their brains love habit and what I call “shoe-top gazing” – never looking farther ahead than the next step, being satisfied that’s all there really is anyway.

Even more important, they not only “recognize” and “know” those things, they act on them. Neuroscience studies show that even when people are in heightened states of optimism and confidence, they rarely turn this into any kind of constructive action.

The likelihood of action is even further reduced when times are tougher and more complicated, uncertain, and even threatening. One neuroscientist, writing in the New York Times, recently explained the impacts of what’s called “the endowment effect”: that things will soon return to “normal” again. “When our brains sense pain, or anticipate loss, we tend to hold on to what we have…. The most concrete thing neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off.”

Some How-To’s

So how do exceptional leaders and teams get past their brains’ foot-dragging to keep making breakthroughs today aligned with their most-desired future? They do it the way everything is done: one specific new pilot-test or step at a time. Here are four key aspects:

First, they go beyond usual goal-setting and have clearly defined what I call “My Most Amazing Future” – whatever is most personally and emotionally compelling to you a year from now, or how you most want to feel about your choices looking back five or ten years from now.  Unlike the usual cognitive goal-setting that rarely changes behavior, “My Most Amazing Future” engages what neuroscientists call emotional experiential memory, or EEM.  In contrast to merely thinking about a target or trying to exert willpower – which rarely works, studies show, as in New Year’s resolutions –EEM “hooks” deeply in the nervous system, mobilizing behavior change that helps you overcome barriers and distractions as you build forward-upward into your most amazing future.

Second, exceptional leaders and teams monitor themselves with the acute awareness that their brains are constantly sending out slow-down and don’t-change-anything messages. One practical strategy is to begin more keenly observing your own behavior – as if sitting on your own shoulder watching how you respond to life’s challenges right now…all day long. Switch your view from the first person, “This is me working toward my own goals,” to the third person, “I am observing myself making the new choices that speed me toward my most amazing future.” 

The ability to observe your own natural reactions and rise above them – to catch yourself as you start to follow old going-nowhere habits and then switch to something more meaningfully innovative – is one of the key things that separates the best from all the rest.

Third, exceptional leaders and teams recognize the paradoxical fact that while our brains are cauldrons of fear, habit, and hesitation that will keep us in the same basic rut for as long as possible, our brains also literally hold the capacity-to-create almost any improvement or accomplishment.  The barrier to overcome is the fact that the brain, left to its own devices and hard-wired patterns, doesn’t want any disruptions. That’s a literal fact about how our brains work: The insights we need to solve virtually any problem already exist within our brains!

Neuroscience studies show that we each have specialized brain cells that can be labeled “breakthrough neurons” and “solution neurons.”

  We have them, but unless we are using these special neurons many times every day – through testing simple changes aimed at making faster progress toward our better future – then these neurons are dormant inside our cranium, atrophied much like unused muscle fibers.  So you must awaken and flex them. The simplest way is through pilot-testing new approaches – one or two at a time, tossing the ones that go nowhere, building on the ones that have promise. 

That kind of ongoing pilot-testing tells your brain you’re serious about moving ahead, and as breakthrough and solution neurons start kicking into action, you become far more adept at making breakthroughs and creating solutions.

Fourth, exceptional leaders and teams put urgency into the daily humdrum by remembering the theme with which this essay began – that tomorrow is the result of what, exactly, they do today. They latch onto a galvanizing, emotionally-charged dream of tomorrow and they always remember that that’s what they’re aiming at with whatever they’re testing today. 

Timidity and habit-repetition may be fine for getting through the day, but they’re worthless for breaking through to a future you really want. You can sit in the departure lounge, all dressed up and ready to go, imagining what a great trip you’re going to have – but if you haven’t bought the right ticket, boarded the right plane and gone airborne, you’re not actually going anywhere…yet. Today’s actions are the choices that get you moving, accelerate your progress,  and then keep advancing you through changing conditions along the way to your most-desired destination.

Know When to Pull Out Your Deflector Shield

One of the most common derailments between where you are and the future you most want to create is negative emotion.  The human brain is hard-wired to attract, clutch and magnify everything negative.  This is an inherent warning system to keep us ever on guard to notice fears and flee.  This also means that a compliment or positive progress-generating action can be scarcely perceptible to the higher brain centers.  Such neural traits helped our species survive a thousand years ago, but most of the time today this negative-emphasis is counterproductive, even damaging.  

Making all of this even worse, negative thinking, emotions, and gossip are contagious.  You literally “catch” them, like a virus, and in similar but far faster fashion they can bring you down.  Exceptional leaders see negative emotion and blanket pessimism for what they are – rarely useful, always distracting.  Accordingly, they avoid hiring or working with mostly-negative people, and whenever negativity appears, they challenge it by saying, “Is there anything, no matter how small, that you can test right now, today, and this week, to work around that barrier or problem to make a breakthrough?”  Almost invariably there is at least one small change that might make things better, and the leader says: “Great, start there.  e-mail me by day’s end Friday on your specific measured progress this week in working around the obstacle or making the breakthrough happen.”

Criticize? Contribute

There is a neuroscience-based rule that I have in my company: You may criticize anything but come prepared to pilot-test the better way. You demonstrate the measured improvement and we will adopt it.  But no one is allowed to snipe or judge without leading the better way.

Another simple rule: Communication is never a substitute for contribution.  A large number of people have learned to chit-chat at length about everything without actually doing much of anything new or better.  They talk more rather than test more.  So cut through verbiage that’s going nowhere by simply asking: “What, specifically, have you tested to make new measured progress toward the targets this week?”  Answer? “Nothing yet.”  My reply: “Go ahead and pick something to test.  At week’s end, my favorite four follow-up questions are: What did you test? What worked? What did you learn? What’s next? 

The most concrete thing that neuroscience shows us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, positive growth orientation – and, with it, the exploratory activity that makes the best of current circumstances while shaping a better future – is turned off.  So we must see – and override – this hard-wired tendency. 

This means never being even a silent accomplice to fearmongers. You must commit to consistently raise a positive, practical voice that encourages testing forward-upward-aimed actions, no matter how small, and do this every day.  In addition, avoid people who are negative-emotion-spreaders – you know, the back-talkers and gossipers; the imaginary-evil magnifiers; the people ever more cynical and pessimistic about life, work, and the economy; and the catastrophizing media – who may be drawing crowds of viewers or listeners but are, in fact, bringing down everyone around them.  Beyond the negative emotions, these same people are the ones waiting for someone else, not them, to start building the better future today.

Becoming better-prepared for challenges makes great sense, but ditch the everyone-into-the-bunker psychos.

Whatever your business, if you think it will eventually come back to “normal” or what it was even a few months ago, your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect.  Instead, actively look for new opportunities. And today there are incredible opportunities to do something differently. 

Yes, some new approaches may stumble at first and some will fail. But while others wait for the storm to pass, it’s the right time to be expanding into new areas of accelerated growth. If not, the opportunities will have passed. 

Do not turn away from the greatest of your opportunities… There is no passion to be found playing small-in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. - Nelson Mandela

This brief essay has highlighted several of the little-known strategies and concrete steps for more effectively and continually creating tomorrow today.  Exceptional leaders learn them, test them, and make them their own. They are living, as the great adventurer and observer John Muir once put it, in the world and not just on the world.

Obstacles and doubts and excuses and fears and worries are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them… they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, and step forward with courage toward your dreams, they will slink out of sight. – Orison Marden

Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least. - Goethe

You probably have seen this image, or some variation of it. In this one, you can recognize either a white chalice on a dark background, or two dark faces on a white background. Notice that it is impossible for you to fully focus on both images at the same time: your brain insists that you must treat as the “figure”—the central object you are paying attention to—and the rest as the background, or what artists and psychologists call the “ground.” If you try to see more, what you end up with is in effect a “blur,” seeing a little of both elements, but not achieving a true focus on either. In a much larger way, this phenomenon is true of our lives in general. Out of all the things we could pay attention to at any moment, we have to choose only one. Many of us may rapidly shift our attention among several different elements, as for example when we say we are “multitasking,” but the fact remains that we can only competently pay attention to one thing at any given moment.i And since there’s so much we could pay attention to, often we wind up in a blur of constantly unfocused or only partially focused attention, or by default we permit our attention to go wherever routine and habit take it.

What Are You Noticing…or Not?

In a Washington DC Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, more than a thousand people passed through the station, most of them on their way to work. He played with passion and skill. “In this musician’s masterly hands,” the Washington Post reported, the violin “sobbed and laughed and sang—ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.” After about three minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace, stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule. About four minutes later, the violinist received his first dollar, when a woman threw the money into his open violin case without stopping. At six minutes, a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. At ten minutes, a three-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly.  The boy stopped to look at the violinist again, but his mother pulled hard and the child continued to walk, with his head turned the whole time.  This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent—without exception—forced their child to move on quickly. The musician played continuously, with passion and skill, for 45 minutes.  Only six people stopped and listened for a short while.  About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace.  The violinist collected a total of $32. When he finished playing, silence took over.  No one noticed and no one applauded.  There was no recognition at all. No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world.  He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.  Two days before, Joshua Bell had sold out a theater in Boston where the average cost to sit and listen to him play the same music was two hundred dollars. This is a true story.  Joshua Bell’s incognito performance in the D.C. Metro Station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste, and priorities.

Can We Wake Up?

This experiment raises several questions, including the following: In everyday life, in all kinds of common environments, at any hour, even for an instant, are we open to being surprised by life’s magic, or have we let all that slide into the background of the often-trivial or habit-driven preoccupations that we make the “figure,” or foreground, of our lives.  It is far too easy for our hard-wired brains to stay tunneled inside their Point-A-to-Point-B rushing, their deeply grooved habits of attention and inattention, and their tendencies to self-absorption. Instead of remaining lost in the unfocused “blur” of life around us and within us, are we willing to intentionally practice extending the “radar” of our senses to capture more of the people, places, and experiences that convey amazement, that represent something exceptional: inspired talent, ingenuity, passion, originality, kindness, cooperation, courage, caring, daring, or beauty?  Can we each then commit to shift gears and pause, even for a few moments, to admire and soak in the wonder, to more deeply appreciate the specialness and then genuinely—even if briefly—express our gratitude? Un-less we consciously engage in this kind of attentiveness and willingness to pause and engage, the hard-wired human brain simply falls farther out of touch, never even noticing that, because almost everyone else around us is falling more out of touch too, so it somehow seems or feels “normal.” How can we each break a bit more free today from the ever-encroaching blur of interruptions and information engulfing our time and senses? If we do not commit ourselves—repeatedly—to grow more awake and more conscious, we always inadvertently end up living more asleep, as this experiment shows. In essence, we are sleepwalking in a frenzy right past amazement, yet never sensing it, technically alive but never fully living, mathematically passing the days but missing far too many of life’s best moments. 

What Will You Do?

If you knew Joshua Bell was “undercover” and performing in a hallway or street corner just ahead of you—one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made—would you hear him today?  Because a thousand variations on Joshua Bell are out there, somewhere near you and me, today, aren’t they? How many invigorating gifts—no matter how small—are we missing as we rush through life?