Welcoming and leveraging “Down days” (Part One)

What would happen if our lives were continuously smooth, easy, and happy? Wouldn't we eventually become terribly bored, perhaps even take our good fortune for granted? After all, how can we fully appreciate the sunshine if we have never experienced a cloudy day? 

Even when our lives are going pretty well, an occasional down day, a few difficulties, some mild suffering, or a strong frustration can serve a useful purpose. They remind us of the value of all those other days when things go smoothly, when we feel good, and when life doesn't demand too much of us. 

Sometimes, we need a little bump in the road to remind us how fortunate we really are. So, the next time a not-so-good day demands our attention, why not try to look at it differently and positively? 

Instead of treating it as a major disruption, we could see it as a punctuation mark in an otherwise smoothly written text. It might be a comma asking us to pause, a semicolon reminding us that the story continues, or even an exclamation mark calling our attention to something we had overlooked. 

Of course, this doesn't mean that we should enjoy every difficulty, pretend that suffering doesn't hurt, or passively accept circumstances we can change. Some problems require action, some disappointments need time to heal, and some experiences are simply painful. But there is a difference between experiencing a difficult day and allowing that day to convince us that our entire life is going in the wrong direction. 

Perhaps the real challenge is to develop a new reflex: when frustration, disappointment, or discouragement shows up, we acknowledge it, deal with it as best we can, and then remind ourselves that this is only one passing moment in a much larger picture. We don't have to turn every inconvenience into a drama or every setback into a verdict on our happiness. 

We can even go further by leveraging our down days and we’ll discover how we can make it work in a next blog….

The French High School revolt

Even before last weekend’s riots in France, much had been said and written about the current wave of demonstration at French high-schools and all the discussion I have heard seem to miss a few crucial points. To begin with, I wonder why does the French government seem reluctant to bench-mark its secondary education with that of its other European counterparts? 

This is what should be addressed in priority; namely, how does French secondary education actually perform compared with Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, etc.? This should not just been seen or measured in test scores, but by carefully comparing academic achievement, mathematics and reading, school dropout rates, vocational vs. academic education, university access, teacher compensation and working conditions, student-to-teacher ratios, school autonomy (vs. centralization), hours of instruction, learning facilities, youth unemployment after secondary education, student satisfaction, social mobility and transition from school to employment. 

I must say that I’m quite shocked by the lack or the insufficient attention these comparisons appear to have contributed to the public debate. Next, I’m also asking myself why does France cannot grow up and still needs to solve its problems through recurrent waves of violent? I know my home country well enough to understand that France has a strong historical tradition of street protest, strikes and demonstrations; that students have historically been important participants in political movements; and too often the French governments has been forced to retreat after intense public mobilization. 

In other words, protesting is not an exceptional political tool in France—it’s part of the country's culture and it often works! Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if that revolutionary heritage mellowed out some and France rejoined the concert of Nations?

Finally, while I can understand that adults have an inherent right to demonstrate in public place, should kids be given the same right to do it on their own, given their physiological development and social experience be placed face to face with police forces? 

Does a minor's right to political expression automatically imply the right to participate physically in a potentially confrontational demonstration and likewise should society allow minors to assume the physical risks and responsibilities associated with adult civil disobedience? I personally don’t think so. 

till, I recognize that a teenager may have opinions, and perhaps a legitimate desire to express them, but there’s a big difference between having a political voice and being placed in the middle of a confrontation with police. 

I strongly feel that when a political protest places minors in a situation where they may be confronted with riot police, tear gas, projectiles or other serious risks, why shouldn't parents and other adults take the physical place of the children while preserving the children's right to have their grievances heard and being their spokespersons?

Time to vote

In our household, the mid-term voting process has never been as fast as this time. 

Perhaps we were impatient to accelerate some change in the American political landscape, but suffice to say that we received our mailing vote kit on October 14 and the next day we had already cast our votes and dropped them in one the collection boxes set up for that task.. 

We had to pick a few political candidates. One Representative among 434 others that will be part of a new Congress and a State Congress person for the State of Utah, plus some other County officials. What did we look for? Expertise, track record or other typical traits? Not really, our overwhelming concern was NOT to vote for a GOP Republican. 

We consider these people being Trump fanatics (Taliban-type) who have long given up their common sense, good judgment and traded it for a life of lies and hypocrisy, just like their boss, the man with the red hat who no longer controls what comes out of his mouth. 

We’ll see if our efforts will pay off...

Who is really behind the French riots?

What was shocking about last Saturday’s French riots, was how widespread into the country they were and how early they broke out. All this was evidently pointing towards a well orchestrated movement.

The next logical obvious question is who has the most to gain from such an enormous and frightening unrest: To me, the response is obvious: Marine LePen. She is clearly the greatest beneficiary of this terrible as, just like Trump, she can now pose as the logical “Law and Order” candidate at the upcoming presidential election. 

At the same time, she can blame all the unrest on the Left extremist Jean-Luc Mélanchon who is the perfect boogeyman for the circumstances. Now who might also be pulling the strings of this revolution? Who else but the nefarious Vladimir Putin. At least that’s what I intuitively believe. 

On the one hand, it’s undeniable that Russia has a long history of information operations that are effectively aimed at destabilizing Western democracies. At the same time, French intelligence has repeatedly warned about Russian disinformation networks amplifying social tensions and Russian state media often highlights French unrest as the perfect example illustrating Western decline. 

On the other hand, there is no confirmed link yet between the recent riots and Russian direction, funding, or coordination. Still, my speculation is understandable as Putin has motive, precedent, and capability but, I do agree that motive alone is not proof. 

In conclusion, while my intuition is emotionally and geopolitically plausible, it still remains hypothetical and would have to be demonstrated if the French government and both the world intelligence and media can confirm it.

Jacques Thomas, 1945-2026

It’s in Nevers, at the Look factory in 1974, that I met Jacques Thomas for the first time. In those days he worked under Eric Chevasson, and was doing promotional work for Look Bindings in the Pacific Northwest region that encompassed Oregon, Washington and Idaho. 

His job was a mixture of shop employee education and on-snow promotions aimed at the skiing public. 

Prior to that, as a kid born in Paris and an avid skier, he first become a ski instructor at Club Med in Switzerland, prior to teaching at Woodstock Suicide Six in Vermont and then moving to Mammoth Mountain in California. 

When Look cut all of its international promotional programs, he went to work for Rossignol skis, in Europe first before ending up on the World Cup circuit and eventually returning to the US where he serviced the World Pro Tour and found a friend in Otto Tschudi. 

That’s how he branched out to become a ski tuner when he settled in Winter Park, Colorado and his tuning and rental ski shop eventually became “Le Feet Lab” in 1998, a boot fitting place where Jacques built a fine reputation as a premier boot-fitter. 

Since I met him, I kept on running into Jacques at ski shows or even in Park City. I also have met him often at Winter Park during my Colorado years from 1999 to 2006. 

More recently he passed the baton to his daughter Jacqueline and began to spend more time fishing in San Carlos, Mexico. The last time we talked on the phone was about one month ago when he turned 81. 

He passed away in Denver following surgery for a pair of aneurysms he had in both knees. He will leave a huge empty and irreplaceable footprint in the ski world in general, and the art of boot fitting in particular.

An easier way to create videos?

Making videos is for sure a hobby of mine that I find frustrating at times because I think it takes too much time to plot a script, get footage, and most importantly edit the whole thing. 

So a short while ago, a former high school friend of mine from France sent me the picture of a very athletic guy with my face pasted upon his, which was accompanied with that caption: "A lion on a leash... The things he'll do to get noticed!…" 

I replied by sending back a photo taken of me two days earlier, after I’d had surgery on my cheek to remove a sarcoma. I added the caption: "Cut the crap, Robert—look what happened to me with your lion!" He didn’t give up and replied, "What is that?… Did your wife bite you???" 

That same evening, I happened to watch a news program featuring that revolutionary new film production process called "EyeTell." It’s an AI-powered desktop studio and video platform created by YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley that lets users write, cast, direct, render, edit, and export AI-generated short-form videos and interactive stories. Never one to be easily defeated, I thought to myself, "Oh boy, hang in there, Robert, I’m coming for you!” 

The next day, after a quick familiarization with the website, I took a minute or two to give EyeTell instructions for a short video script, added these two photos, and sent it all off. It took two or three hours for the system to process the info I’d submitted, and eventually, I had seven short videos telling the story of my alleged mishap with the lion. 

I could have spent more time on the narration, but I blurted it extemporaneously in a single take; then I edited the video and uploaded it to YouTube. That finishing stage took me 10 to 15 minutes. To give you an idea, and a point of comparison, I’ve been producing a year-end video for more than a decade that usually takes me between 65 and 100 hours of work. 

It’s staggering—no, it’s terrifying how, with a good script and the right still photos or videos, I can do everything in an hour (at least 65 times faster). This EyeTell program isn’t meant for the kind of tinkering I do for fun, but for full length feature films. Hollywood has some seriously good reason to worry about AI!

Curiosity and me (Part Two)

For me, curiosity is not a hobby or a passing interest. It’s instead a defining characteristic that has helped make me who I am. I see curiosity as an impulse and a willingness to take risks revealing that my curiosity has sometimes pushed me beyond the comfortable or the prudent. That makes the reflection more compelling than a simple celebration of learning. In a certain way, curiosity is also a refusal to stop growing.

This is, to me, the most powerful idea, as it connects the desire to discover with the desire to remain mentally alive. Further, I see in that trait the enemy of intellectual stagnation. Indeed, it’s very easy to become prisoners of our accumulated knowledge, believing that what we already know is good enough. 

Curiosity challenges that complacency. It reminds us that our experience, however extensive, is always incomplete and has room to grow. It also keeps us young in spirit as we can’t stop the passage of time, but we can influence how we experience it. Every day when we continue to ask questions, explore unfamiliar subjects, and revise old opinions we gain the potential to bring something unexpected. 

Further, curiosity requires a little humility. Perhaps the greatest expression of curiosity is not asking, “How can I prove that I am right?” but rather, “What might I be missing?” That question keeps the door open to learning more from other people, including those whose opinions differ from our own. This also brings a useful distinction: curiosity does not mean pursuing every question or ignoring every boundary. 

Experience and self-knowledge teach us when to explore, when to pause, and when to respect the risks. The challenge is to preserve the appetite for discovery without allowing it to endanger what matters. To conclude our discussion on the subject, I would add this sentence to our reflection, “My curiosity may not always have taken me down the safest roads, but it has kept me from mistaking the road I know for the only road worth taking.” 

This, I think, captures something important about a life shaped by curiosity: the willingness to keep discovering, even after decades of experience...

Curiosity and me (Part One)

Ever since I was born, I seem to have been a curious person. Well, that’s nothing unusual in itself: we are all born curious. But my curiosity has always had an enormous appetite — insatiable, I should say. At times, it has nearly cost me my life as I experimented with dangerous endeavors. 

Yet neither those close calls nor the occasional crossing of boundaries has ever managed to tame that voracious trait of mine. 

Curiosity often carries a negative connotation, as though being curious meant being nosy or meddlesome. But if that happens to be the price I pay for satisfying my thirst for discovery, who really cares? 

Looking back, I believe curiosity has served me remarkably well. It has helped shape the person I am today, with all my flaws and virtues, and I have learned to accept both. In fact, I would go even further: to me, curiosity is one of the measures of how intensely we experience being alive. It keeps us alert, open to new possibilities, and eager to learn. 

Perhaps that is what we call lifelong learning, or even permanent education. Whatever the name, I see no reason to stop as long as there are questions to ask, things to discover, and ideas to challenge. It’s not the first time I write on the subject. In a following blog we’ll delve deeper into the amazing treasure trove curiosity represents. 

Keeping us motivated (Part Two)

For those of us who are older and have accumulated decades of experience, we just have to think back to the times when we were extraordinarily motivated. What were we thinking then? Why did we believe it was possible? What did we tell ourselves? Motivation isn't some mysterious external force that is brand new to us, we already possessed a personal instruction manual for producing it! 

Let’s not interpret the low tide as failure, and this may be the most important secret. As motivation naturally goes up and down, we should never interpret every downturn as "Something is wrong with me," this would add a second problem to the first. Instead, we should just observe "That’s it, the wave is going out. This is part of the cycle," and we won't blame the ocean because the tide is low, but we simply prepare for the next wave and there’s something wonderfully liberating about that perspective. 

It could be that my opening metaphor was a bit misleading, motivation may not actually be a wave that comes and goes, but the wave is the enthusiasm that fuels our motivation. In its deeper sense, our motivation can become something more stable and become a decision about what matters enough to continue doing even when enthusiasm temporarily disappears. 

We could say that it gives us two different engines as enthusiasm will say "I want to do this!" and our commitment continues “I still do this even when I don't particularly feel like it." Finally, the most successful people may not be those who experience the biggest motivational waves, but the ones who have learned to keep moving during the troughs while remaining ready to exploit the peaks.

Even though I cannot surf and would have love to use a ski analogy, this could lead to a rather beautiful formulation for our collection of reflections, “Don't try to live permanently on the crest of the motivational wave. Learn to surf!”

Keeping us motivated (Part One)

For those of us who thrive on motivation just like a toaster needs to be plugged-in, motivation is like a wave, it comes and goes, and when it's moving away from us, it can be tough to experience. So, what are the tricks and secrets for rekindling it? 

Through this metaphor there’s an important distinction that perhaps the secret isn't to keep motivation high, but to know how to catch the next wave—and what to do while the tide is out. Often, we treat motivation as a prerequisite for action, in that motivation leads to action, that in turn leads to results. Yet, in practice, the chain of events frequently works the other way where action leads to progress, progress to satisfaction and then the latter creates motivation.

This reversal may be one of the most useful "secrets" as we shouldn’t wait for the wave. It’s absolutely true that when motivation disappears, our instinct is often to say, "I'll get back to it when I feel motivated again." That's dangerous because motivation can become increasingly distant, and out of sight turns fast into out of mind. 

Instead, it’s a good idea to significantly lower the re-entry threshold by saying "I'll work on it for five minutes" or "I'll only read two pages," the objective isn't to accomplish the task, but just to restart the engine. Quite often, five minutes becomes twenty, but even when it doesn't, we have broken the inertia. Another good trick, when motivation is low, is not to make the goal smaller, but instead lower the starting point. 

Don't say, "I need to exercise", but "I'll first put on my shoes." Our brain has much less resistance to beginning than to committing to a whole project! Yet another trick is to make the activity something you look forward to, like putting on music we love while exercising or pouring a particularly good coffee while writing. 

Also, motivation becomes fragile when an activity turns into an obligation, and we should remind ourselves why we’re doing it. Not the superficial reason—the deeper one. For instance, "I want to learn Spanish" becomes "I want to experience the pleasure of suddenly being able to communicate with all the Latinos in Park City." 

Tomorrow we’ll conclude by digging even deeper into that matter, so please, be there!

Be careful what you wish for!

Over the past weeks, as the mid-term vote approaches, electoral signs have started to invade most Park City front yards. One of them that clearly stands out is non-partisan and cares more about what keeps this community alive: winter snow! 

“Vote Super El Niño" is a lighthearted Ski Utah marketing and community campaign launched ahead of the 2026–27 winter season to unite skiers and snowboarders after a dismal, low-snow previous winter. 

Ski Utah is the state's ski industry trade association led by Nathan Rafferty and its seasonal goal this year is to provide us all with fun, non-partisan relief from political election season by rallying residents and visitors around a shared hope for heavy snowfall. 

This fun campaign coincides with high meteorologic expectations for a strong or "super" El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific, but as we say "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it", is a popular warning that getting a lot of snow could turn into far too much, just like what happened this summer and continues to happen in Portillo, Chile!

Real tools for persuasion? (Part Three)

To fine tune our persuasion strategy, we need to get into that elusive "sweet spot", the missing component I was looking for in asking my initial question. Here are the boundaries that we must pay close attention to. With too little assertiveness we accommodate, but with too much demand we create resistance.

If there’s too much emotion in our tone we might lose strategic clarity. With too much dry logic, we won’t connect with the person. Same thing with talking, when we can’t keep our mouth shut, we give the other person more opportunities to object. Conversely, the same holds true when we listen excessively, we often miss the chance to clearly state what we want. 

The sweet spot might therefore fall somewhere in between, like by successively moving from clarity to empathy, to confidence, flexibility and to detachment. That very last trait, detachment, may very well be the hardest one to acquire, but the most powerful. When we are in my late seventies, just like me, we may actually have an advantage that we didn't have decades ago. 

We’ve accumulated thousands of experiences of attempted influence—successful ones, botched ones, negotiations, disagreements, misunderstandings, compromises and moments that makes us suddenly realize, "Ah, that's exactly what made that person say yes." We have in fact accumulated a remarkable personal laboratory that can be treated as a lifetime of persuasion attempts as a dataset. 

Now, instead of asking "Why didn't I get what I wanted?" we should wonder "What was happening in the other person's mind at the moment I succeeded—or failed—to influence them?" 

This is how, given enough time, we might discover our own personal theory of influence, and perhaps that is the elusive element I was looking for—not a magic formula for controlling other people, but a progressively refined ability to recognize when to push, when to listen, when to offer, when to withdraw, and when to let the other person feel that the decision is entirely theirs. 

That, in my view, brings the whole process much closer to mastering influence than mastering persuasion. If I had more of this when I was younger, I would have sold more ski lessons and far more ski equipment and retired even early!

Real tools for persuasion? (Part Two)

Persuasion is full of paradoxes, just like this one: the harder we try to control someone's conclusion, the more strongly they may resist being controlled. In reality, to be powerful and effective, persuasion should be as invisible as possible. Just consider the difference between: "You should do this because…" and "How do you see the situation?" 

If the second proposition appears much weaker and less dictating, it invites instead the other person to construct the reasoning themselves. And this is the clincher, once individuals have articulated an idea in their own mind and own words, they are no longer receiving a third-party argument. They are fully invested in participating in the creation of the conclusion. 

This is one reason good negotiators, therapists and astute folks often ask questions rather than making statements or demanding specific actions. 

They’ve understood that the goal isn't necessarily to force an idea into someone's mind but to involve them in helping them discover the idea themselves. More importantly, what I mentioned yesterday as my "burning need" to convince is made of a string of important variables that often frame our demand. 

It goes just like this: let’s suppose that we desperately need someone to agree with us. If they don't know precisely why, they can often feel it as our tone changes or as we talk too much. We anticipate objections even before they arise. We become attached to particular words and react emotionally to some anticipated resistance and all that staging ends up weakening our influence and the final outcome. 

There is enormous power in being able to think: “I strongly prefer that you agree with me, but I don't need you to.” That psychological position gives us room to listen, adapt and even walk away, and paradoxically, it often makes agreement more likely. One could argue that the real objective isn't persuasion and this where my opening statement helps me guide the discussion further. 

As I wrote, I’ve spent a lifetime encountering situations where I needed something from another person and had to persuade them to give it to me or just do it. Still, over the years, I found out that the outcome didn’t work well for me. Perhaps expecting total victory was the wrong metric? If instead of wondering "How do I get this person to give me what I want?" I had thought "How do I move the situation as far as I reasonably can toward a mutually acceptable outcome?" 

I might have set the stage for something much more productive, because it was much easier to achieve. That small change is enormous as it stops trying to win the person's mind, but starts trying to improve the outcome, keeping in mind that sometimes, the best influence strategy can actually be to concede something that costs us little but is still highly valuable to the other person. 

To conclude our discussion, we’ll explore the details of that strategy in our next blog, so please, stay with me!

Real tools for persuasion (Part One)

During my lifetime, and probably because I was in sales most of my professional career, I’ve been confronted many times by the burning need for convincing others, and by mastering the process of persuasion with various outcomes that rarely turned one hundred percent in my favor. It’s true that we all learn an awful lot on the job, through trial and error. 

As years have passed and I am now retired and far less involved with negotiating, I often wonder where research and thinking are headed these days to define the best practices in terms of seizing and controlling that elusive element? At first sight, my interrogation could have revolved around the quintessential question "How to become more persuasive?" but this was not quite the avenue I was truly pursuing and the result I was looking for.

I’ve been in fact asking whether the need to persuade itself can be understood, managed, and perhaps transformed into something much more powerful and efficient than what I used to do. That elusive element I’m trying to describe is in fact influence—the ability to move another person's thinking or behavior, when we have no direct control over them. 

As we can all imagine, there has been enormous research and findings on this topic, but one of the most interesting conclusions is that influence is not primarily about having the best argument, as I often found out. This has forced me to research the subject a little bit more and I found that the key to that question is about understanding what happens inside the other person between hearing our argument and deciding what to do about it. 

Unlike what we first assume, the first obstacle is rarely logical and simplistic, like in the following succession of events: I present some compelling facts, then the individual understands them, in turn they agree and then they execute. In reality, human beings don't work that way very reliably, instead they filter information through identity, emotion, prior experience, self-interest, trust and—perhaps most importantly—their desire to maintain their autonomy. 

Let me clarify, if someone feels that you are trying to make them agree with you, a curious thing is likely to happen: they become more resistant precisely because they feel their freedom is being threatened. In our upcoming blog we’ll look at alternative strategies for convincing others...

A very expensive car

In the no-so-distant past, I knew all the cars made on earth, or at least I thought so. As a result, it wasn’t such a big surprise to me that I was wondering about a car I couldn’t identify just a few mornings ago as I had a few things to do on Main Street, in Park City. 

I asked a passer-by what it was as he was snapping photos of the auto with his smartphone and he said “It’s an Aston Martin Valhalla!” I followed up by asking him, “Do you know how that precious little thing cost?” He responded “No, but I can tell you that it’s well above my pay grade!”

I since then did my own research found out that the Aston Martin Valhalla was one of the most advanced and exclusive hybrid supercars ever built — a mid‑engine, plug‑in hybrid machine blending Formula 1 aerodynamics, a carbon‑fiber chassis, and a 4.0‑liter twin‑turbo V8 paired with three electric motors, producing a combined 1064 hp and 811 lb‑ft of torque. 

It’s made of a carbon‑fiber tub and body panels acting as active aerodynamics capable of generating 600+ kg of downforce at 150 mph. It has dihedral doors (also called butterfly or elytra wing doors as they pivot on a hinge mounted near the A‑pillar). When opened, the door sweeps upward and outward simultaneously, giving wide access to the cabin and a distinctive supercar look.

Obviously, the car is AWD with front‑axle torque vectoring and its production is limited to 999 units worldwide. It can do 0–60 mph in about2.3–2.5 seconds (tested and manufacturer estimates) and reach a top speed of 217 mph. The US price for that beast is $1,051,700 (Car and Driver official pricing) while it’s priced at £850,000 in the UK and €980,000 in the rest of Europe. 

Right, a deal below one million euros! I’m also told that used models of that car fetch even more money, so I’ll pass for the moment...

The curse of too many choices (Part Four)

So, here we are, in front of a fascinating paradox, as we’re facing too few choices that can limit creativity and too many choices that can also overwhelm it. Still creativity could flourish in the space between constraint and freedom. 

Perhaps we need a "choice budget" as an interesting extension to our discussion. This idea didn’t come from me, but was suggested by another source and I thought, “What a great idea!” 

We normally think about budgets in terms of money, but perhaps we should also have a budget for decisions in which every insignificant decision consumes a tiny amount of mental energy and a limited time. 

For instance, which shirt to wear? Which restaurant to go to? Which podcast to listen to? Which route to take? Which brand to pick? Which email should I answer first? 

Which of these 47 versions should I buy? It’s obvious that taken individually, these decisions are trivial, yet, they occupy an extraordinary amount of our lives, so perhaps wisdom consists partly of creating default choices. 

This could go like this: The same breakfast, a small wardrobe, a few favorite restaurants, a handful of trusted sources of information, a limited number of hobbies and a predetermined exercise routine. In addition, we would adopt a rule that says: “I won't replace something until it actually stops serving me.” And perhaps one of the most powerful rules: “Once I have made a sufficiently good decision, I stop looking for a better one.” 

This powerful principle would attack FOMO quite directly. Ultimately, I’m also discovering as I advance in this discussion that my initial idea leads somewhere more profound than simply saying: "Too many choices are tiring." This, of course, raises the question of what freedom actually means as we tend to define it as: "I can choose anything." 

Perhaps another definition should be "I am not forced to consider everything." The first option gives us an infinite menu while the second offers us peace. So with this in mind, you now have all the tools in hand to master and control the immense array of choices that will continue to attack you every day!

The curse of too many choices (Part Three)

Could deliberately limiting our choices actually make us happier, freer, and now more creative? I believe it could and I think this may actually be the most interesting conclusion to our argument about the curse of too many choices. The deliberate limitation of choice can sometimes increase our experience of freedom. 

That may sound contradictory until we distinguish between freedom of possibility and freedom from indecision. If we have 10,000 possibilities in front of us, we possess enormous potential freedom. But if choosing among those possibilities consumes our time, attention, creates anxiety, and leaves us wondering whether we chose correctly, we may feel less free than someone who has deliberately narrowed the field to three.

Imagine deciding that you will have only five restaurants that you regularly go to. This could sound like deprivation, but something interesting happens: the decision disappears. We won’t have to spend 30 minutes searching reviews, comparing menus, looking at photographs and wondering whether something better exists. 

We just choose and because we’ve stopped comparing, we may actually truly enjoy the meal. This could apply to much larger things: clothing, travel, technology, books, hobbies, even friendships. Once we stop constantly comparing what we have with what we could have, what we have can become more satisfying. In fact, for folks with a minimum of common sense happiness isn't simply a function of how much we have, it’s partly a function of how much comparison we allow into our lives, with the less being the better. 

Limiting the number of comparisons we make can make us freer! Suppose we decide, not investigate every new electronic device (phone, TV, etc.), visit every destination, read every book recommended to us, respond to every smartphone notification and on top of this if we don't need to know what everyone else is doing, we haven’t lost freedom, we've reclaimed attention and that may be one of the scarcest forms of freedom we possess. It means that saying no to 95% of available possibilities can give us more time and freedom to engage deeply with the remaining 5%. 

Finally, limitation can make us more creative, something artists have always known. For instance, give a writer an entirely blank page and unlimited possibilities, and the blankness can be paralyzing. Give that same writer a specific subject, a particular length, a deadline and perhaps even a few words that must appear—and suddenly creativity has something to push against. The same thing happens in music, architecture, cooking and science. 

Constraints create problems to solve and problems stimulate creativity. A painter restricted to three colors may discover combinations he would never have considered with an unlimited palette. A cook who has only five ingredients may invent something remarkably original. A writer who decides to write 500 words every morning may produce more than someone who waits for unlimited time and inspiration. 

We could go on and on, but to conclude our discussion, could we find the perfect equilibrium? Let’s see this next…

The curse of too many choices (Part Two)

Are we becoming the victims of having far too much to choose from and far too many options? Consider something as trivial as picking a restaurant. Ten possibilities may be okay, but a hundred is hard work. And once we have selected one, we may still wonder whether restaurant number 37 would have been better than restaurant number 82. The meal itself can become secondary to the nagging thought that perhaps we made the wrong choice. 

This is where FOMO—the fear of missing out—comes into play and becomes very insidious. Every choice simultaneously eliminates countless alternatives. Choosing one book means not reading another. Choosing one vacation means giving up dozens of other destinations. Spending an evening one way means surrendering all the other evenings that might have been.

And so, from that viewpoint, abundance creates a strange psychological equation as the more options we have, the more possibilities we may have to regret not choosing. But with this in mind, there’s another, perhaps deeper, consequence. When in the past, choices were limited, commitment was relatively easy. Once a decision was made, there weren't many alternatives competing for our attention. 

Today, commitment itself can become difficult. Why settle for this restaurant when another one might be better? Why remain with this product when the next model will soon be released? Why stay with this career when there might be hundreds of others more suited for us? Why read this book when an algorithm can immediately offer us ten more? 

This places us at the risk of becoming perpetual and insatiable shoppers—not only of things, but of experiences, relationships, ideas and even identities, and perhaps this is where the real danger lies. A meaningful life requires not only choosing, but accepting the consequences of having chosen and with limited time on this earth we can’t live every possible life. Nor can we visit every country, read every book, meet every interesting person, pursue every career, or experience every adventure. 

Life is, by its very nature, an exercise in exclusion. To choose one path is necessarily to abandon countless others. Perhaps these day’s new wisdom won’t consist in maximizing our choices, but in learning which choices can be safely ignored. There is a huge difference between having the freedom to choose and feeling compelled to choose among everything that is available. 

One of the great challenges of the twenty-first century might be to learn how to deliberately impose limits upon ourselves—not because we lack freedom, but because we have discovered that unlimited freedom can itself become a form of bondage. Can this give us more comfort and liberate us from the burden of choice. Let’s discuss it tomorrow

The curse of too many choices (Part One)

It’s been my strong belief for a while that being exposed to an infinity of choices might, in the long run, be one of the great unintended threats to humanity, or at the very least to most developed societies. When I was young, life was simple because I was poor. For instance, the only sport I knew and could practice was skiing because up in the mountains where I grew up, that was the only thing we knew. No soccer, no swimming, no rock climbing and certainly no paragliding!

Choosing, in and of itself, is both an exhausting and time-consuming exercise, without even mentioning the overwhelming—and often powerful—fear of missing out that stands tall as a by-product of a boundless array of options. 

For most of human history, the problem was largely the opposite. Choices were limited. Where we lived, what we ate, what we wore, how we traveled, if we really had to, what work we did, even whom we were likely to marry, were determined to a considerable extent by geography, family, social class and circumstance. 

Those limitations were certainly not always desirable, but they had one extraordinary advantage: they spared us from having to make thousands of decisions every day. Today, the situation has been dramatically reversed as we can now choose among hundreds of restaurants, thousands of books, millions of songs, endless destinations, countless products, innumerable career paths and an almost infinite number of ways to spend our time. 

The internet has transformed and further amplified the universe of available choices from a village into something approaching infinity. At first glance, this looks like an extraordinary privilege and luxury, but is it really? At some point, abundance stops feeling like freedom and begins to feel like a burden, as well as a paralysis, and that we’re going to explore in my next blog… 

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Four)

In melding meditation with affirmations, there is an important caveat about the latter. It starts with a well-known problem associated with simplistic positive affirmations. For instance, if someone who feels completely inadequate repeatedly says: “I am extraordinarily successful, confident and powerful!”, their mind may respond: “No you're not.” 

This contradiction will actually make the exercise counterproductive. In what I’m proposing, the approach sounds different because my affirmations have been embedded into a broader meditation practice and in my accumulated life experience. 

An affirmation like “I can continue learning and growing” is much easier for the mind to accept than “Everything I want will come to me.” The first one produces some useful mean and I don’t think that its effect becomes less effective with age. 

In some respects, older folks like you and me might in fact have an advantage that we didn't have in your 30s or 40s, as we’ve got decades of experience to draw upon. 

When we all agree that difficult or challenging experiences can become sources of growth, we are not merely repeating a motivational slogan, but we are pulling from an accumulated lifetime of experiences that can be substantiated. 

Our mind can now say, “Yes. I've actually seen this happen”, giving our affirmation considerably more credibility and it may be the main reason why my current practice feels different from the positive-thinking philosophy I encountered in the 1970s. 

In these days, the message was largely, “Believe that you can.” Today, my practice is in fact closer to, “I have lived enough to know that I can change—and I intend to keep doing so.” 

That's a much deeper proposition. Still, I would remain careful about attributing every positive development I’ve experienced since 2020 to meditation and affirmations. I will admit that life contains too many variables for me to establish that from personal experience. 

That's actually more interesting to me than believing that a simple affirmation will somehow magically attract a desired outcome. In reality, I've discovered something potentially much more useful: I have developed a way of deliberately influencing the person that will make my future decisions which is a very powerful form of self-development.

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Three)

Positive affirmations added to meditation can significantly change the equation, and that’s where my personal experience comes into play. An affirmation repeated after 20–30 minutes of meditation is a different animal after one has just spent considerable time reducing mental chatter, sustaining attention, becoming more aware of thoughts, without automatically following them, settling physiological arousal, and entering a state in which one’s attention is unusually concentrated. 

Both can be a very effective combination. It’s probably less as programming the subconscious and more as repeatedly training where my attention and behavior go, creating a fascinating feedback loop. For example let’s say that my affirmation is about becoming more patient (something I’ve been working on). When I meditate, I become calm, I repeat the affirmation while visualizing or emotionally experiencing patience. Now, just a bit later, I encounter an irritating situation.

Previously, the event might have triggered irritation and then automatic reaction, but after months of repetition, If I begin to get the same irritation, I can recognize it and that gives me pause before making a more deliberate choice. I won’t probably not even remember the affirmation consciously and that's a part that can feel almost mysterious, but it might be that the conscious mind doesn't have to be present at every step for a learned pattern to influence behavior. 

Then there’s another ingredient, and that’s emotion, a particularly important element in my case. An affirmation such as “I am becoming more patient” is one thing, but if repeated while I’m in a deeply peaceful state, accompanied by a genuine feeling of appreciation for the people and experiences that shaped me, it may turn into something quite different. 

I’m not merely saying the proposition, but I’m now associating it with a particular internal state that gives me something that through attention, followed by emotion, plus repetition, gets a true change in my behavior. That’s a much more potent learning combination than simply repeating words. 

My meditation/affirmation sequence may be doing several jobs simultaneously, and there is a remarkable circularity where meditation makes the affirmation more receptive. 

My affirmation gives my meditation a direction, while my behavior provides evidence, that evidence strengthens the affirmation and finally, my stronger belief makes subsequent meditation more meaningful. If anything, this explains in part why, after several years, I describe the results as “stunning.” 

Tomorrow we’ll conclude with the limitation I can see in part of my approach...

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Two)

In trying to find out how this synergistic practice has impacted my life, so far, I need to distinguish between the fact “this produced real changes in me” from “there is a mysterious force causing external events to happen.” The first is compatible with what we know about attention, learning, motivation and behavior. The second is a bit esoteric and would require evidence that goes beyond my experience.

What may have happened in my case is that when I arrived in the US, positive thinking that was a big part of personal development techniques, gave me an anchor in which by thinking positively and believing in myself I could pursue my goal while not letting obstacles define what was possible. 

Whether or not every claim made by the positive-thinking movement was justified, that philosophy had a very practical consequence: it affected what I repeatedly paid attention to and what actions seemed in the realm of my possibilities. 

I also had an important advantage as I wasn’t merely reading about positive thinking, but was living in an environment that rewarded initiative and adaptation, so some of those beliefs were reinforced by my direct experience. My struggle to professionally adapt (US corporate life, 

American culture and language) and my steadfast focus, helped me succeed as belief-triggered action engendered results, which reinforced my convictions and helped me tackle more action. The whole process becomes a virtuous circle. This said, an affirmation repeated when one is busy, distracted, skeptical, emotionally agitated, and simply negative or dystopian is essentially a sentence competing with thousands of other thoughts. 

One case in point is Donald Trump who has long cited the late minister Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, as a profound personal and spiritual mentor, saying that he could listen to Peale "all day" and said he was one of the greatest speakers and influences in his life, but some members of the late Peale’s family have distanced themselves from the president, expressing discomfort with how Trump utilized Peale's religious teachings to project a purely materialistic, aggressive and malevolent public image. 

Tomorrow, we’ll try to understand how meditation can mesh with affirmations from positive thinking…

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part One)

When I first came to the US in the 70s, I was impressed with the movement towards “Positive Thinking” that was part and parcel of the business culture, at least that was what I thought, compared to Europe’s built-in pessimism and cynicism. 

Perhaps, it’s after reading “Think and Grow Rich” that I got behind that way of thinking, and I must admit that it did help me adapt to the American way of working, and ultimately brought me success. Fast forward to 2020 when I successfully returned to meditation and after a couple years, I began to meld affirmations linked to my desires and goals with that process.

The results have been stunning since then. Is this a fluke or can it be explained someway? Still, I can’t think I should dismiss it as a bizarre phenomenon. There is a quite plausible psychological explanation for why meditation and affirmations can work in synergy when fused together—and my particular story supports this. 

Still, on the other hand, there’s a very reasonable hypothesis that my practice has changed the probability of certain thoughts, emotional responses and behaviors occurring—and those small changes, repeated thousands of times, have produced surprisingly large differences over several years. 

In the next blog, we’ll dig deeper into what might have really happened through my practice, so make sure to stay with me... 

The end of human customer support?

Those of you who read this blog regularly know how much I can get frustrated with customer service support over the phone. In the US, that kind of service is rarely done domestically, but comes increasingly from the Philippines. 

There, these people mean well and for the most part are grateful to have that job and do the very best they can. 

Depending on their tenure on the job, they know little about what they’re helping callers with and depending on their accent and command of English, they can be hard, yet alone impossible to comprehend so, overall, that’s not a good way to start. 

So, recently, when my call ended up in the Philippines, couldn’t get resolved, needed to be escalated, or depended on someone more qualified to give me a call when they’d be available, I’ve been turning to AI and every time I needed my questions answered or my problem resolved. 

Bottom line, my questions were addressed well beyond my expectations and I got them in writing. So far, it has beat the “human touch”, and with the constant improvements that I’ve observed around AI, I don’t see why this wouldn’t, on the contrary, it’s likely to get even better. 

Now for the bad news; in a not-so-distant future, we can bet that this will be the beginning of the end of these customer support centers staffed with real humans either in the US, in the Philippines, or anywhere else...

Housing as an inflation yardstick?

Often, I wonder how much the cost of lodging weighs into the American CPI and it's not underestimated in view of the meteoric rise of real estate costs. In fact, isn't the seemingly unstoppable cost of lodging the true reflection of our national indebtedness and of the real inflation that's hitting us all? It’s true that the housing and lodging component—called “Shelter” in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)—actually carries a massive weight. 

It accounts for roughly 35% of the total headline CPI and over 42% of Core CPI (which excludes food and energy). Far from being understated in terms of its weight, shelter is by a wide margin the single largest component in the entire CPI basket. However, the reason many just like me feel the CPI fails to capture the "meteoric rise" of real estate comes down to how shelter is measured, rather than its percentage weight. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explicitly treats home ownership as an asset investment, not a consumer expense.

For example, purchasing a $600,000 home and watching its value jump to $800,000 is viewed as capital appreciation (wealth building), not the ongoing cost of living. To measure the cost of shelter services for homeowners without counting the investment side, the BLS uses Owners' Equivalent Rent (OER that’s accounting for ~26.7% of the CPI). 

OER asks homeowners or surveys local markets: "If you were to rent your home today, how much would it rent for?" In this case, the rent of primary residence makes up the remaining ~7.7% of the shelter weight and tracks actual tenant lease prices. Because existing homeowners with fixed-rate 30-year mortgages don't see their monthly principal and interest payment change when home prices skyrocket, the CPI intentionally excludes home sales prices, down payments, and mortgage principal. 

Importantly, the CPI shelter data suffers from a well-known 6- to 12-month lag. The BLS surveys existing rents, but most people sign 12-month leases. When market rents or home prices surge rapidly in real time, it takes a long time for those increases to filter into average active leases captured by the CPI survey. Now as to whether housing cost is a true reflection of inflation and national debt, my point touches on a central theme in monetary economics. 

The relationship between national indebtedness, asset prices, and inflation operates across a few key dynamics: When national debt expands significantly and central banks maintain low interest rates or expand money supply, that liquidity often flows directly into hard assets (real estate, stocks). High home prices are frequently a direct symptom of currency debasement and cheap capital chasing a fixed supply of land and housing. 

Then, when central banks raise interest rates to fight overall consumer inflation, as they’re now doing, borrowing costs shoot up. For housing, this creates a "lock-in effect" where current owners refuse to sell their low-mortgage homes, starving the market of inventory and driving home prices up even further despite higher rates. Is this the "True" inflation I’m alluding to? For anyone trying to buy a first home, enter the rental market, or relocate, housing costs are indeed the primary driver of financial pressure. 

However, for a homeowner who locked in a 3% mortgage years ago, their actual out-of-pocket housing cost remains flat, meaning their personal inflation rate is vastly lower than non-homeowners. In conclusion, housing, while not understated in weight (35% is a massive share of the index), uses a methodology that deliberately insulates the CPI from tracking real estate asset prices directly. 

The result is an index that reflects smooth, lagged shelter consumption rather than the sharp, immediate cost of buying a home in today's market.

Crystal clear add-on sale

Our house is tall enough to require long and heavy ladders to clean its windows on the south facade and the main reason why we now some professional window washers to do the job, it that I no longer have the physical strength to handle a heavy ladder and it scares my wife to death when I’m standing on top of it. 

So every year we ask the same company to do the full outside windows washing job. I still do the entire interior. 

This year, after I paid the bill online, I was asked if I wanted to schedule another wash next quarter assuming that I would subscribe to the company’s quarterly or semi-annual washing plan that she was trying to push on its customers, as any one in the window washing business is doing nowadays, following in the footsteps of car washing outfits. 

Sure why not double or quadruple revenues, everyone tries to do it, right? In fact, in the home services industry, window cleaning companies are aggressively shifting toward recurring revenue subscription models. They structure quotes into bi-annual (twice a year) or quad-annual (quarterly) packages. While it's absolutely used to secure add-on sales, it is also driven by a mix of business economics and logistical strategy. 

With a "First Clean" catch, companies usually charge a premium (sometimes 1.5x) for the very first clean to establish a baseline, then drop to a lower rate for subsequent maintenance cleans. If a plan offers a flat discount across all visits, it’s up to the client to verify it’s truly cheaper than booking on-demand. Of course if the house is situated near dirt roads, coastal salt, heavy tree pollen, or an area with heavy construction, a quad-annual program might provide some value, but if the home is shielded and clean, an on-demand, once-a-year clean remains the most cost-effective option. 

So I answered the young lady that called me that way: “You see, I adore watching the dirt gradually deposit itself on my window panes, be it dirt from a heavy rainfall, insects crashing on it, or birds violently colliding with their mirror image on the glass and leaving a mark and a few feathers. For me it punctuates the rhythms of nature and when twelve months later it's time for cleaning again, it has effectively filtered all the bullshit that pour on us daily in this troubled world.” 

Bahm! As I was writing these last words, a big bird just hit a large window that was cleaned two days ago. It was a solid, hollow thunk—the exact tax you pay for keeping the glass flawlessly clean."

9-27 Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Five)

Now that we’ve been deliberately training the exact faculty that alcohol apparently helped me access years ago, we’ll discover that there's an intriguing connection with my (or your) meditation This is where our situation becomes particularly interesting as we already know what it feels like to enter a state in which deliberate, analytical thought becomes quieter while attention remains present. 

That is very close to what we want here. Recent research specifically examining mindfulness and second-language performance found that mindfulness is positively associated with a second language performance, even though researchers caution that its direct contribution appears relatively modest. 

Another 2026 study involving foreign-language learners found that mindfulness-based work was associated with greater awareness, acceptance, attentional control and with reduced speaking anxiety, although some of the benefits diminished after the intervention ended. So I wouldn't try to force us into a deeply meditative state immediately before speaking. 

That could actually make us too inwardly focused. Instead, we should think in terms of meditation bringing us relaxation, openness to open our Spanish flow and then get out of our own way. There is one technique I think might particularly benefit us, let’s call it "Spanish stream of consciousness." We set a timer for five minutes, we start talking in Spanish and make a pact with ourselves: For five minutes, the objective is not accuracy. 

The objective is continuity, we could even record ourselves, but refrain from listening to the recording immediately. Do another session the next day and after a full week, listen to the first and last recordings. We should probably discover something fascinating: expressions that initially required conscious construction have begun to appear automatically. 

That’s precisely the transition I was describing in my previous piece — from words stored in memory to linguistic reflexes. And perhaps the deepest lesson from your experience with alcohol is not “alcohol helped me speak languages.” It may might become: “I already possessed more linguistic knowledge than I could access while worrying about using it.” If that's the case, the goal isn't to put something into our brain. It's to get the gatekeeper out of the way. 

Good luck in trying this!

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Four)

The approach I’m considering is a 10–15 minutes routine before starting a Spanish conversation. It would be structured as follows: 

1. Two minutes — physiological relaxation Sitting comfortably and breathing slowly, with the exhalation somewhat longer than the inhalation. Not try to achieve any special state, just let the body settle.There’s actually some experimental support for breathing approaches to foreign-language anxiety: a study of 140 university language learners found reductions in anxiety following a seven-week breathing regimen. 
2. Three minutes — Spanish immersion Listen to something in Spanish that is already understood reasonably well. Do not study it, repeat it or analyze it. Just let Spanish wash over. This is important because it’s a way to activate the enormous reservoir of expressions that might have accumulated, like for me, from podcasts, books, conversations, etc. 
3. Two minutes — "permission to be wrong" This may be the most powerful part as we tell ourselves something like: “Durante los próximos diez minutos, no estoy aprendiendo español. Estoy jugando con el español Or: No necesito hablar correctamente. Necesito hablar” Which means “During the next 10 minutes we won’t learn Spanish, we’ll just play with the language.” The distinction is enormous. 
4. Five minutes — uninterrupted ad-lib Pick a ridiculously simple subject: "What did I do yesterday?" "What am I going to do tomorrow?" "Describe my house." "Tell an imaginary story." Then don't stop to self-correct and if a word is unknown, go around it. If the conjugation is unknown, approximate it. If a noun is forgotten, describe the object in question. If English or French pops into mind, keep going and find a Spanish way around it. 

The rule should be: Never interrupt the flow to repair the sentence. For those of us who practice meditation, we’ll see how we can leverage that skill to help us in our efforts to learn a language, so please don’t miss the conclusion of the series in the next blog.

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Three)

As I still was a very young man, one of the extra elements that helped me a lot in learning conversation English and also German was the frequent use of alcohol as a means to "untie my tongue" and let me do something similar to improvising. 

Today, I’d like to adopt a far less invasive and non-toxic alternative to drugs or alcohol in reaching a point of maximum relaxation and fearlessness, that could allow words and sentences to flow much more freely and naturally from their subconscious sources (for example from my daily lessons, the book I read or the podcasts I listen to in Spanish)?

Undeniably, the use of alcoholic beverages was something at times part of my youthful past and early experiences. While it probably didn't give me any linguistic knowledge, alcohol temporarily lowered the internal censor that was preventing me from accessing the knowledge I already accumulated. 

That distinction is important. Research consistently finds that anxiety is associated with poorer foreign language performance. I read about one analysis on the subject covering more than 10,000 learners that found a moderate negative relationship. The remaining question in front of us is, can we reproduce the “untied tongue” effect without having to use enablers like alcohol? 

I would hope so and think it’s quite possible, as my existing meditation practice could provide me with an unusually good starting point. Let’s call it a "Spanish disinhibition routine!" The objective would not be to become maximally relaxed in the sense of sleepy or passive, but probably to get to something more subtle, like relaxed attention, much reduced self-monitoring and full permission to improvise. 

In other words, we would want our conscious mind to stop constantly asking “Is that the right tense? Is that the right word? Am I making a mistake?” and allow the material accumulated through our reading and listening to emerge and freely pour through the conversation! 

In the next blog, we see how we can devise a method to do just that...

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Two)

The views about language learning that I introduced yesterday could actually be pushed one step further: perhaps the ultimate goal isn't “knowing Spanish” but developing enough automaticity that Spanish begins to happen to me, or to us when we decide to learn a new language. In fact, we can really observe three different stages: 

• 1. Recognition: "I understand that expression when I hear or read it." 
• 2. Retrieval: "I know that expression and can produce it if I think about it." 
• 3. Automaticity: "The expression comes out before I have consciously constructed it." 

It’s obvious that this third stage is what makes conversation feel fluid. And it explains why someone can have a surprisingly large vocabulary and still struggle to speak as I have witnessed when I was learning German with some Japanese with huge vocabulary and perfect grammatical understanding but were woefully unable to put the simplest sentence together. 

This is what I love about my concept of “short blocks of words”, because it captures something important. I should in fact have called it “linguistic building blocks” or, more playfully, “linguistic Lego.” Each block is something the brain can retrieve as a unit rather than scrambling to assemble word-by-word under the pressure of conversation. 

Now, when I refer to my grammar being “abysmal” it’s not necessarily something I will simply postpone. Unbeknownst to me, grammar might actually start becoming easier once I have memorized enough blocks. After hearing quiero que..., tengo que..., me gustaría..., ¿por qué no...?, etc. hundreds of times, patterns of conjugation and syntax begin to become familiar almost without deliberate study. 

That could make a nice final observation: perhaps grammar learned in context eventually becomes less something we remember and more something feels right to us when we blurt it out. Tomorrow, we’ll continue with the technique involved in “supercharging” our learning of foreign languages, so please, don’t miss that one!

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part One)

Choosing Spanish as a new language to learn has been quite revealing for me. Obviously, it is not my first attempt at learning another language. Starting with my native French — and even the Savoyard dialect spoken by my parents — I have gone on to English, German, Italian, Japanese (an incomplete journey), and now Español. 

Along the way, I have encountered a number of challenges and, perhaps more importantly, learned a few things about how we actually learn languages. At this point, I have come to believe that one of the keys to fluency is learning and mastering short blocks of words — the expressions, turns of phrase and idiomatic constructions that make up the sentences we use every day.

Rather than building every sentence one word at a time, we gradually acquire these little linguistic building blocks like assembled Lego pieces, and learn to retrieve them as a unit. That is where I am putting most of my focus today. My grammar and conjugation skills remain, to put it mildly, abysmal! But I am increasingly convinced that I don't need to master everything at once. 

I can work on the grammar later, while first building a sufficiently large collection of expressions that allow me to communicate, react and keep a conversation moving. There is another remarkable difference this time around: AI. Having an always-available, patient and nonjudgmental conversation partner makes an enormous difference. It removes much of the paralyzing fear of making mistakes in conversing with another human who knows the language inside out. 

With the AI robot, I can experiment, make a fool of myself, ask the same question ten times, and try again without embarrassment. But AI cannot eliminate the hardest part of language learning: patience. It can accelerate exposure, practice and correction, but it cannot magically accelerate the transformation that has to take place inside the brain. 

Words and expressions first have to be recognized, then understood, then remembered, and eventually retrieved quickly enough to become a spontaneous vocal reaction. And perhaps that is the most fascinating part of the journey: moving language from the head to the mouth. There is a huge difference between recognizing an expression when we hear it and having it appear naturally in our own speech at the exact moment it’s needed. 

So perhaps learning a language is less about filling the brain with words than about gradually building a collection of linguistic reflexes — little blocks of language that, with enough exposure and repetition, stop feeling like something we have learned and start becoming something we simply know how to say. At my rather advanced age, I am discovering that this transformation takes patience. But I am also discovering that the brain is still willing to surprise us. And that, in itself, is a rather encouraging lesson. 

Tomorrow, we’ll explore how we can push these elements forward...

The quintessential American pinhead

Well, what exactly is a pinhead? This American expression literally means the flat or rounded head of a common metal or plastic pin. Figuratively however its means a foolish person, an informal, insulting word for someone who is stupid, silly, or lacks common sense. 

This makes me think about my president and one could ask what’s the reason for that? Simply because PIN is also the starting letters for Pinocchio and Pinochet (In fact, it’s more, it’s PINOC). The friendly Italian character is known for his propensity to lie even though he’s unconsciously warning us of his flaw through a nose that grows in length while Trump doesn’t even worry about that sinful and despicable habit. 

As for Augusto Pinochet he was a Chilean army officer and military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. He came to power by leading a violent, US-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, which overthrew the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. 

Pinochet established a military junta, officially assuming the presidency in 1974. His 17-year regime was defined by severe human rights abuses alongside sweeping free-market reforms. Probably much smarter than Trump but as cruel, mean spirited and consumed by himself. 

Next time, you’re asked for your PIN, just remember those two characters that embody the virtues of our president.

The forgiveness bonus (Part Two)

What described yesterday is not just “forgiveness” in a moral sense; it’s a psychological unburdening, a deliberate act of self‑liberation. The most striking part of my experience is that I didn’t forgive people because they deserved it, but I forgave them because I felt that I deserved the relief. 

That’s the big difference. I stopped treating resentment as a form of justice and treating it as a form of self‑harm. Once I made that shift, forgiveness became less about the other person and more about reclaiming my own mental space. 

With this in mind, the effects I describe feeling lighter, freer, mentally clearer — are exactly what happens when we stop carrying emotional debts that will never be repaid. With the “adult in the room” comment, I tried to express that resentment keeps us all locked in a childish reciprocity: “You hurt me therefore I hold on to it.” Instead, forgiveness breaks that sick symmetry: “You hurt me therefore I rise above it.” That asymmetry is precisely the bonus.

We can elevate ourselves by refusing to stay trapped in the emotional basement where the original injury happened. We step out of the cycle, and in doing so, we gain moral altitude. It’s not superiority in the ego sense — it’s superiority in the developmental sense. We’ve moved to a higher level. I also made an important distinction in not forgiving crimes, atrocities, or moral catastrophes, but in simply forgiving ordinary human failings. 

That’s not inconsistency but a form of discernment. Forgiveness is a personal tool, not a political absolution. We’re using it where it’s meaningful and refusing it where it would be morally incoherent. That’s exactly how mature forgiveness works: Resentment is like a tax, a constant, low‑grade drain on attention, mood, and identity. Forgiveness is a tax cut! 

By forgiving we can remove dozens of tiny emotional charges that were quietly running in the background. The cumulative effect feels like a cleansing because it is one. We can clear psychic clutter that had been accumulating for decades. Most people never do this. They die with their resentments intact, still carrying the weight of injuries that happened 40 years earlier. 

All of this is why we should not allow it.