Do you have seven minutes to change your life? Really. This is one of the more powerful and important videos I’ve seen in a long time. It’s about happiness. In particular, it’s about the connection between gratitude and happiness. As it turns out, expressing gratitude is one of the most effective ways to increase happiness. Which is what makes this video powerful – not the idea itself, which we’ve explored in other places on this blog – but because the good folks at Soul Pancake actually took research about the connection between expressing gratitude and levels of happiness and replicated the experiment and filmed it for us to...

This TED Talk, by 15 year-old Dong Woo Jang, brings together several elements of recent posts and favorite topics of mine: Grit – the ability to persevere through adversity to pursue a goal. Making things – taking pride in the time it takes to craft something, whether a violin, coffin, or guitar. Creativity – in this case, taking ordinary objects and seeing in them the potential for something else in the hope that it will inspire and touch others. So here’s the backstory: Jang was bored. And since he wasn’t allowed to play video games, he entertained himself by seeking out fallen tree branches from which he intended to make bows....

One hundred and fifty years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered a remarkably brief speech of just 269 words as part of the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA, just over four months after the decisive Battle of Gettysburg. We call that battle “decisive,” and in the larger picture it was, but at this time the war was hardly over. Though later called the “turning point” of the war, that effort could have been forgotten were there not other monumental victories and, for that matter, Lincoln’s own re-election in 1864. For this reason, he was conscious of the need to remind those in attendance of the...