Never Look Down at the Cup

When I was in college, I worked at a popular Mexican restaurant. Every Friday night, I’d watch my friend who was a cocktail server maneuver around the packed lobby delivering drinks to customers who were waiting to be seated. One day I asked her, “How do you carry those trays of drinks through all those...

How Are You, Really?

My husband passed a coworker in the hall the other day and said, “How are you?” The man responded, “Fantastic.” My husband said, “Wow, that’s great.” The man said, “When someone asks you how you are, always say fantastic. No one wants to hear about your problems.” This strikes me as sad. I agree with...

How Not to Help an Artist

I read an interesting article recently about how men talk to women entrepreneurs about their new projects or businesses. They tend to issue warnings about pitfalls and to caution the women, as if they’re not aware of the challenges and don’t know what they’re doing. Women, on the other hand, tend to give the speaker...

Chasing Perfection

Anthony Doerr recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See. And his book is not only noteworthy, it’s popular. It seems as if everyone I know has read or is reading that story, including one of my relatives, who is one of the sharpest...