personal development on Being Obnoxious

At a dinner party, [The Scottish playwright George Bernard] Shaw sat next to a young man who proved to be a bore of historic proportions. After suffering through a seemingly interminable monologue, Sh...

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”

I’m sitting at a traffic light in my neighborhood, waiting for the red light to turn. I’m trying to be relaxed and unhurried about my life. Before I have a chance to respond to the light that has just...

Computers give rise to many amusing salutations that could also offend. Humorous examples include the legendary Mr. Obe, a fine old West African name that didn’t happen to belong to the recipient (OBE...

We often become offensive to respectable types when we enter into other people’s suffering and brokenness, or divulge our own.

In his excellent book, Unoffendable, Brant Hansen shares a few humorous, but sadly true, stories of people being critical of his work at a Christian music station: One day, we talked about the local...

In this short excerpt from Brant Hansen’s excellent book, Unoffendable, the author shares a “hypothetical” example of how he deals with online criticism. Generally speaking, it never goes the way you ...

Let’s state the obvious, because the obvious is easy to take for granted and forget. You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over wha...

The ego is incredibly busy – in other words, it is always drawing attention to itself. It is incredibly busy trying to fill the emptiness. And it is incredibly busy doing two things in particular – co...

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

At a recent gathering of seminary professors, one teacher reported that at his school the most damaging charge one student can lodge against another is that the person is being “judgmental.” He found ...

Extravagant wastefulness in time might prove the most productive thing you choose for yourself.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

When we insist on doing too much, we are not only inflicting the damage of this choice on ourselves, we are sharing this damage with those we love the most.

One of the cardinal rules of improvisational theater is that actors must never steal scenes. In her book Improvisation for the Theater , Viola Spolin bluntly puts it this way: “Any player who ‘st...

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

At eighteen, a self-assured Benjamin Franklin returned to Boston, the city he had fled just seven months earlier. Dressed in a fine new suit, with a watch on his wrist and a pocket full of coins, he p...

The person striving for superiority is “always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others ​and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgm...

To be curious about that which is not one's concern while still in ignorance of oneself is ridiculous.

My son Michael and his wife, Amy, also have been on the dance floor with their Fear Dance. And their reactions have not always been pretty. One day Michael came home with a new cell phone and plan—abo...

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

The habit of always putting off an experience until you can afford it, or until the time is right, or until you know how to do it is one of the greatest burglars of joy. Be deliberate, but once you...

Are these hyperscheduled, overactive individuals really creating anything new? Are they guilty of passion in any way? Do they have a new vision for their government? For their community? Or for themse...

“He wanted Everest in a day; if it took two, he lost interest.”

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.