Author: Rick Bellingham

“Whatever you think rigor looks like, you should go up a few notches.”  Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy “Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.”  Dean Koontz, NYT best-selling author One of my favorite lines is “don’t believe what you think.”  We can have a lot of vigor for a particular idea or belief independent of the amount of rigor we invest to substantiate Read More

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Victor Frankl “People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.” —Plato Growth can be for better or worse. Growing physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually is almost always a good thing Read More

“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.” —Thich Nhat Hanh “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius Life is so easy.  There are only two required tasks – we have to breathe and we have to die.  In their hit  song, Dust in the Wind, the group Kansas sings “All your money won’t another minute buy.”  Read More

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” —Martin Luther King A friend recently asked me why everyone called George Clooney by his real name and very few people knew that Fonzie’s real name was Henry Winkler.  My wife said, “that’s easy – George Clooney has been in Read More

“Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it’s not like you’re going to fix yourself and become a different person.  You remain the same person, but you become awakened.” —Jack Kornfield “To be, or not to be?  That is the question – whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, AND, by opposing them, end them?”  —Shakespeare, Read More

“We all have different narratives; all of our narratives are at different stages of development.”  —Viola Davis “If they were right, I’d agree, but it’s them they know not me.  Now there’s a way and I know that I have to go away.”  —Cat Stevens I’ve been thinking lately about how the narratives we create for our lives, or those that are imposed upon us, can limit or expand our possibilities.  The question is, “how Read More

“Ideologies separate us.  Dreams and anguish bring us together.”  — Eugene Ionesco “The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.”  — Tom Robbins “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”—   Eleanor Roosevelt “For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”  — Margaret Hefferman Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.  Without innovation, it is a corpse.”  — Winston Churchill My Read More

“I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.” —Lady Gaga After reading the New York Times every morning, I need to find a sanctuary where I can recover from the daunting and depressing news around the world.  For me, that means retreating to my bedroom to meditate for 30 minutes and playing my guitar for 30 minutes more.  My little sanctuary helps me to Read More

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”  —Raymond Williams “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.”  —Angela Davis “A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they are dead.”  —Leo Rosten “America has never been moved to perfect our desire for greater democracy without radical thinking and radical voices being at the helm of any such quest.”  —Harry Belafonte “A radical inner transformation and rise to a Read More

In French, the word for wine is vin.  If you want to order a glass of red wine, you say:  “Je voudrais un verre de vin rouge, s’il vous plait.”  In this post, I’m going to use VIN as an acronym to discuss the importance of finding connections with people according to Values, Interests, and Needs.  I like VIN as an acronym and vin as a drink because they represent the flavors of connections as Read More

 “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”  John Maynard Keynes “Old friends pass away, new friends appear.  It is just like the days.  An old day passes, a new day arrives.  The important thing is to make it meaningful:  a meaningful friend or a meaningful day.”  Dalai Lama “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”  George Bernard Shaw Read More

I joined the Army in 1967 identifying as an IBMer and was honorably discharged in 1970 feeling more like an SDSer. (Student for a Democratic Society).  I interviewed for a job at IBM before I started basic training at Fort Knox in the hopes they would keep me in mind when I got out.  The Army told me they would send me to Monterrey, California for 6 months of German language training and then on Read More