A Fender loyalist on why protecting a legacy sometimes means resisting the urge to protect it too hard. I’ve been playing Fender guitars since I was 12 years old. My first one was a Squier Strat that my grandmother probably regretted buying the second I plugged it into an amp. I’ve owned other brands since, […]

Working in communications ruins presentations for you. You stop watching the slides and start watching the room instead. Who’s nodding, who’s lost, who’s given up and started reading three paragraphs of text while the presenter is talking about something else entirely. Do this long enough and you start noticing the same pattern over and over […]

People often ask why I enjoy theme parks so much. Usually they assume it’s the rides, or the shows, or the fact that I spent part of my career working in them. Those things are certainly part of it, but they’re not the real answer. Some of my favorite days in a park have involved […]

I’ve lost count of how many meetings I’ve walked into where I knew something was off before anyone said a word. The slide deck hadn’t been opened. Nobody had started presenting. Sometimes people were still finding seats. But you could feel it. Maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was the way two people avoided […]

A few months ago, I was seriously considering having my son’s next birthday party at Bricks & Minifigs. If you’ve never been to one, imagine a candy store for LEGO fans. Used sets. Loose bricks. Minifigures. Kids building things together. Adults pretending they’re only there for the kids. It checked all the boxes. I’m not […]

Somewhere along the way, we started confusing kindness with weakness. You see it all the time. The manager who thinks being blunt makes them a better leader. The executive who mistakes intimidation for confidence. The politician who confuses screaming for diplomacy. The person on social media who built an entire following by being spectacularly unpleasant. […]

I may not work in the theme park industry anymore, but I did my time there. Long enough to understand both the how and the why behind a lot of what happens operationally. Recently, while visiting a major theme park, I was directed into a parking row where one space was clearly the low point […]