Opinions and Theories are Not the Same as Facts

Please understand the differences in what you’re finding online.

It’s March 2025 and eggs — the kind that come out of chickens and are a staple in American breakfasts — are not only in short supply, but more expensive than ever. This is a fact that you can confirm for yourself by visiting any supermarket or grocery store that sells them.

Bird flu is spreading throughout the US. It has caused the death or destruction of millions of commercial egg farm hens. This is also a fact. Here are some recent trustworthy references to support this:

Hens
These were two of my hens, back when I kept chickens. I had as many as 18 at one time and was selling eggs to my neighbors for $4/dozen. I miss them but have trouble getting them cared for in the winter when I’m away.

Hens lay eggs. Fewer hens mean fewer eggs. This is a combination of fact and logic. As someone who has had a backyard flock of hens on and off for the past 30 years, I can assure you that the more hens I have in my flock, the more eggs I get.

The economic concept of supply and demand states that, well, you can read it for yourself in this quote from the Supply and Demand entry in Britannica Money:

supply and demand, in economics, [is the] relationship between the quantity of a commodity that producers wish to sell at various prices and the quantity that consumers wish to buy. It is the main model of price determination used in economic theory. The price of a commodity is determined by the interaction of supply and demand in a market. The resulting price is referred to as the equilibrium price and represents an agreement between producers and consumers of the good. In equilibrium the quantity of a good supplied by producers equals the quantity demanded by consumers.

I was a business major in college so I took Economics 101 and 102. I know this stuff. It makes sense to me. And if you think about it, it should make sense to you. Prices on items that are scarce but in demand are generally higher than the same item if it’s available in higher quantities. This can be a natural result of marketplace economics, as the above paragraph suggests, or it can be manipulated by sellers to either increase profits on scarce commodities or control the sale of them.

An example of using price to control sales is what I recently saw in a local supermarket that had some eggs available for sale. If you bought one or two dozen, they were about $7/dozen. But if you bought more than two dozen, the price went up to about $10/dozen. Hoarding has become a problem with the egg shortage and this supermarket was trying to discourage that behavior by jacking up the prices for hoarders.

That’s not to say that some producers, wholesalers, or retailers aren’t trying to cash in on the shortages. There will always be people and organizations that take advantage of a situation.

In the case of producers, I don’t blame them one bit. If you had a flock of a 10,000 chickens and lost 7,500 of them to bird flu — science says it’s 75% to 100% deadly to birds — you’d not only have to spend a boatload of cash to make sure your facility was free of the pathogens, but you’d have to buy 7,500 replacement birds. Commercial hens might be different, but I know I had to wait four to five months for any of the chicks I obtained to start laying in my backyard. That’s a huge cash outlay and reduced productivity for months. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to cash in on the eggs being laid by the 2,500 birds I have left. Supply and demand supports this, especially since the loss of hens is so widespread.

But this is still an opinion. You might think it’s fine for farmers to take a hit that might actually drive them out of business. That’s your opinion.

The farther you go up the chain from the producer with suddenly less product to sell, the less acceptable it is to cash in on the scarcity. But that’s still a moral judgement or opinion. It is not a fact.

And then there are the conspiracy theories. Big Henhouse is controlling the price of eggs and using bird flu as an excuse. There really isn’t a shortage at all. They’re just pretending it is to separate consumers from their money.

Is this a fact? No. Is it based on facts? Perhaps a few. Maybe egg prices are unreasonably high in an area that hasn’t been hit by bird flu. But maybe those producers are also sending their eggs out to areas that have been devastated by bird flu.

What is the truth? What are the facts? Are these Big Henhouse price gouging conspiracy theories what’s actually going on? Or are they just a tool to focus your hate and anger on big business?

If you’re actually trying to answer what I’ve posed as rhetorical questions, don’t just share the first Google hit that supports your view. Look at the source of the information. Far left? Far right? Anti-big business? Or a news outlet that tends to focus on fact-based reporting? Don’t respond to this post with something you read on the New Republic or in Mother Jones or in a blog post in a popular blog. That’s not news. It’s opinion and/or theory based on cherry-picked data.

I don’t know about you, but now that I’m not producing my own eggs and feeling forced to eat them every day just to keep up with production, a dozen lasts me more than a week. Yes, I’m one person and I understand that larger households probably eat more eggs. Although the prices will never get down to what they used to be — ever heard of inflation? — they should eventually come down as the bird flu problems are resolved and flocks are rebuilt. Until then, if you find them too expensive for your household, eat fewer eggs. You don’t need them for breakfast every morning. And you don’t need as many as you think you might.

Otherwise, just stop stressing over the price of eggs and worrying about who is profiting in the current situation. Despite what your super socialist friends might think, price fixing by the government is not a reasonable long term solution — especially with the current government. Buy only what you need to help prevent scarcity. If everyone did this — remember supply and demand? — the prices will likely come down sooner than later.

Microsoft Shoving AI Features Down My Throat is the Last Straw

Enshittification forces me to sever my 30+ year relationship with Microsoft Office products.

Warning: This post contains strong language. (I’m pissed.) If you can’t deal with a good sprinkling of f-bombs, it’s best to click away now.

I cancelled my Office 365 subscription today.

I didn’t think I’d ever drop Word and Excel. After all, I know these two applications better than any other on my computer.

Office 365 Apps
Apparently, all these apps come with Office 365 now. Who cares? All I want is a word processor and spreadsheet that works just like it did 20 years ago.

These apps made it possible for me to leave my last full-time job, in 1990, to start a career as a freelance writer and computer consultant. One of my first gigs as a freelancer was teaching Word and Excel — and Lotus 123; remember that? — in classes of up to 8 people for a computer training organization and its clients. I wrote three Microsoft Word courses for them.

The first book I wrote for Peachpit Press, way back in the 1995, was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6; I also wrote Excel 5 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide and the Macintosh Bible Guide to Excel 5 the same year. I followed that up the next year with my first Windows book, Excel for Windows 95: Visual QuickStart Guide. Over the years, I wrote a total of 22 books for Peachpit about either Word or Excel and even managed to write one about Outlook for Microsoft Press, even though I only used it for about a year or two for my own personal email needs. More recently, I self-published a little book that explains exactly how to sort data in Excel; it still sells more than 10 years after publication.

My first training video was about Microsoft Word for macProVIdeo back in August 2006. (What a great trip to Vancouver for that job!) I then went on to author another four Office-related courses for Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) between 2009 and 2014.

When I needed to keep track of hours flown and maintenance due for my helicopter, I did it in Excel. I also used Excel to keep track of mileage and stops on my Great Loop trip. In fact, I’m likely to use Excel more than anyone you know who doesn’t have a job requiring them to use it.

And Word! Hell, it’s a word processor and I’m a writer. I wrote dozens of my books in Word. I’d even fire up to write a quick note.

But my mutually beneficial relationship with Microsoft Office has changed.

It started when they made Office subscriber-only, forcing users to pay an annual fee with promises of regular upgrades. What they didn’t mention was that Office apps would start to “phone home,” to make sure they were installed on a computer owned by a user with a valid subscription. Failure to access the Internet when it needed to do one of these checks resulted in problems. It became unreliable as a tool when I traveled with my laptop. Who knew when it would force me to log into the home server?

And, more recently, they added AI features that can scan your documents to “help you create, communicate, and collaborate more efficiently.” Pardon me, but bull-fucking-shit. The last thing in the world that I need is an application that’s sending the text of every single thing I write to a faceless server in a data center somewhere. How long before one of my phrases or descriptions appears in some generative AI text based on the prompt of a stranger 6,000 miles away? And who else has access to this info?

Connected Experiences settings
If you turn these options off, forget about accessing the onscreen help and templates that you paid for as part of the Office 365 package.

Of course, turning this off means tracking down the settings to do so, which are buried behind a button labeled with the benign phrase Connected Experiences inside the Privacy preferences. (That should say something to you.) Click that button to find settings in an all-or-none setup. You can’t turn on the second check box to download templates and access online help unless you turn on the Turn on all connected experiences check box. And, of course, that first check box admits that it will send your content to someone or something somewhere.

It was the inability to access Help from within the app with this crap turned off that really started to bug me. But do you want to know what the last straw was?

The message that appears in my blank Word documents, before I’ve had a chance to type a single character, a message suggesting that I use the Copilot AI to draft my document.

Word Woes
This is what Word looks l like now each time I open it. I disabled the AutoUpdater it put into my System settings, as well as another autolaunch app that apparently checks my subscription on their website every time I launch an Office app. How else would it know, only 15 minutes after the fact, that my subscription was cancelled? The only way to get rid of that dialog box is to force quit it.

And we thought Clippy was bad.

I am a fucking writer. I wrote for a living — and still do get paid to do so (although not as often as I’d like) — for more than 20 years. I do not need a fucking AI assistant to help me draft a document or even to check my GD grammar. I want these features turned off with absolutely no clue left behind to hint that they even exist.

And I want to access onscreen Help when I need it, right from within the document. How about like it was in the old days, when you actually got help files installed with the app instead of a menu command dumping you into a forum where someone might or might not have the answer to your question?

And when I contact help and choose the chat option because I’m not likely to understand the heavily accented script-reading voice of the overseas-based support team, if it says the average wait is 2 minutes, I don’t expect to wait 16 minutes. You’re running a GD computer. It can’t calculate average wait times? Bad enough I wound up spending 54 minutes of my day trying to get a solution. Yes, I timed it!

And I don’t want my computer connecting to the Internet every fucking time I launch one of your apps. If I subscribed last March and the app checked in then, it should not need to check in again until this March. And I certainly don’t want it sending the contents of my documents to your server to play with in ways only vaguely discussed in your 50-page, lawyer composed terms of service.

I want a work processor and a spreadsheet app. I don’t want an assistant or content thief.

When I finished with the chat, I had a solution alright. My solution was to cancel my Office 365 subscription, which was due to renew next week. I then went directly to the web site for Libre Office and downloaded it. After 30+ years as a Word user and “expert” — I think authoring 24 books and 6 video courses about Office products establishes that — I’m switching to a different word processor. I hope it’s as good as everyone says.

And if it decides to start phoning home, I’ll be writing in TextEdit.

Stop Making Excuses. Make a Plan.

In which I attempt to encourage you to follow your dreams and try to tell you how.

Personal Philosophy

Lately, it seems like I’m on a personal philosophy kick — I keep writing blog posts that reflect the philosophies that drive my life. This isn’t new in this blog, but it does seem concentrated these days and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to avoid thinking about what’s going on in the world around me? And I’m doing that by looking inside myself?

The reason doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that these things are important to me. I feel a real need to share my thoughts on these matters, hopefully to help others who are lost or without focus.

Remember this: there’s only one person in your entire life that you can always count on to take care of you: yourself. Make yourself the best you can be and you’ll have a great person you can rely on for the rest of your life.

Like most people these days, I spend time socializing on social media. In my case, it’s Mastodon, a system remarkably like Twitter in the early days, where you can post short “toots” with text, images, links, and/or polls and then discuss them with the other folks who have seen them. There are lots of differences between Mastodon and other social media, and because that’s not really what this post is about, I’ll skip a deeper discussion. Let’s just say that because there’s no algorithm determining what you see, you see all of the toots posted by all of the people you follow, as well as the conversations between the people you follow, even if you’re not involved in that conversation.

I use social media for the social aspect of it. I’m not trying to become an influencer or increase my follower count. Although I will occasionally post links to new jewelry items I made and put up for sale and I always link to new blog posts (which is done automatically), I mostly just share images, observations, thoughts, and short term plans with the folks who follow me. I’m pretty much looking to see the same thing from the people I follow. I don’t see many toots every day (considering the hundreds of people I follow) and that’s because I have filters set up to block out all the political crap going on in the world. I’m not sticking my head in the sand, but I’m also not stupid enough to get my news from social media. (If you’re getting your news and “facts” from social media, take a moment to think about why and whether it’s really a good idea. No need to tell us your conclusions here, though.)

One of the things that makes me inordinately sad these days is the number of posts by people I like who mention something they want to do but can’t. Sometimes they explain why they can’t, otherwise, they just leave the reasons unspoken. Maybe the thing they want to do is so outrageous (at least in their minds) that they feel that don’t need to explain why.

Either way, I’m left to wonder how much they really want to do this thing that they “can’t” do.

Making Excuses

Eight and a half years ago, in July 2016, I wrote a blog post titled “Making It Happen.” In that post, I focused on my personal achievements as they related to my ownership of a helicopter and the building of a successful career as a pilot — when I was in my 40s. I talked about how I was able to achieve a goal that most people — including me at one time — think is out of reach.

In that blog post, I relate a short anecdote about an airline pilot friend questioning why I was bothering to learn how to fly helicopters when I’d never make any money doing it. He was basically saying I was wasting my time. I went on to write:

But think about how easy it would have been to accept his “expert opinion” and not try to move forward with any kind of career as a pilot. It was a built-in excuse for failure. Why try if this guy who knows the industry better than me says it’s impossible?

How many people do that? How many people simply don’t try because they think the odds are stacked up too high against them?

I wish I had a dollar for every person, man or woman, who told me that they “always wanted to learn to fly.” My question to them is this: what’s stopping you? (I sure hope it isn’t an asshole like my former airline pilot friend.)

I don’t want to re-write that post here — you can go read it for yourself if you want a more specific example from my life of what I’m trying to communicate here. But I do want to share one more paragraph:

Everyone dreams of doing or learning something special that’s important to them, but how many people do it? Some try but fail because they don’t realize from the get-go that achieving a difficult goal is a lot of hard work with very long hours and no guarantee of success. It takes planning, it takes funding, it takes the ability to work smart and have Plan B (or C or D) ready when things don’t work out as you expected. It’s easier to not try and to simply keep dreaming.

How Important Is It?

And that brings me back to my social media friends and their toots about dreams they “can’t” fulfill.

The other day, in a conversation about the most recent stock market downturn (which looks pretty bad this time), I tooted:

It always comes back, but now that I’m tapping into it to buy silly things like food and the occasional computer monitor, I’m just hoping that if we do have another long-term dip, I’m still alive when it comes back.

I tried retirement and it doesn’t suit me. Gotta keep busy. The trick is getting someone to pay me for that busy time.

The person I was conversing with replied:

Not to minimize what you’re saying, which is certainly legitimate. But I would love to trade having a 9-to-5 for trying to convince people to pay me.

With the way things have been going lately, let me know if you need a deckhand. I can tie a few knots reasonably well, I can read a chart, and I can reliably put in to a dock under sail power. I know that last one isn’t relevant, but I still am amazed I can do it and i think its okay to brag every once in a while.

Sailboat
I shot this photo of a sailboat in Chicago last August. Sailing looks like a wonderful way to spend time, but it sure seems like a lot of work.

Okay, so in one toot he confessed two wishes for changing his life:

  • going freelance
  • working on a sailboat

He didn’t mention how much he really wanted to do either of these things, but he was clearly thinking about them. Are they important goals? Something he’d really like to achieve? Or was he just being conversational?

(Also, I bet he ties knots better than I do.)

But the one that really broke my heart this week was this one, tagged #3GoodThings:

– You can’t go, but you can dream about going, and that’s something.

– You can’t do, but you can dream about doing, and that’s something.

– Fancy coffee.

My questions to this person — which I did not ask — are:

  • Why can’t you go? How much do you want to go?
  • Why can’t you do? How much do you want to do it?
  • Why are you apparently satisfied with dreaming about going or doing?

It takes a great deal of self-control to not draw people who post things like this into conversations. But that’s what this blog is for. I can address these things for a bigger audience while leaving the people who got me thinking about it anonymous.

If You Really Want It, Do Something about It!

Let’s do a little exercise together, shall we?

1. What do you want to do?

Think about something you’d like to do. Something you’d really like to do.

Learn to speak another language? Play the piano? Visit Notre Dame? See the Pyramids? Go sailing? Learn to fly? Juggle? Watch a Navajo weaver make a rug? Visit 100 countries before you’re 50? (or 60 or 70?) Run a marathon? Be an artist?

I could go on and on with all kinds of suggestions, but these are just seeds to get you started. I’m sure you have at least five things you can come up with that you’d like to do.

Note that I said do and not buy or own or have. We’re not talking about material things here. We’re talking about doing things.

Brainstorm until you’ve got a few. If you need to, set a 5- or 10-minute timer to think only about these things. Don’t get distracted! Write them down.

2. How much do you want to do them?

Now think about how much you want to do these things. How important are they to you? How they might change your life to make it better. Make some notes.

Do not think about why you can’t do them. Not yet.

If you have more than one — and you really should — rank them in order of importance. Which one is most important to you? Which one do you want to do most?

3. What are your excuses?

Let’s focus on that number one item. Ask yourself why you aren’t doing that thing. What are your excuses?

Excuses are what’s holding you back. Some of them are good, valid excuses. Some of them are just plain dumb. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you want to learn to fly like so many passengers in my helicopter have told me they wanted to do. Here are some possible excuses — the ones I’ve actually heard:

  1. I’m afraid of heights.
  2. I’m worried about crashing.
  3. It’s expensive.
  4. I worry about something happening to me and my wife/kid/etc being left alone.
  5. A friend said I could never make money doing it so I’d be wasting my time and money.
  6. The weather sucks where I live.
  7. I don’t have an airplane so when would I get to fly?

4. Which excuse(s) are valid?

Now look at all those excuses objectively and cross out the ones that are bullshit. If #1 and #2 are true, you really don’t want to learn how to fly. #5 is bogus; who cares what your friend told you? #6 is also bogus; weather changes and do you think you’ll live in the same place your whole life? #4 is problematic in that it assumes the worst — and indicates a very pessimistic view of your abilities. (Also, you’ve heard of life insurance, haven’t you?) #7 can be overcome with airplane rentals. Your flight school will rent an airplane to you. That ties in a bit with #4, which is probably a pretty valid concern, especially if you decide you want to fly helicopters.

Take the remaining list of excuses after you’ve crossed off the bogus ones and look at them one by one. It’s time to work around the excuses.

Coming Up with a Plan

Are you still with me in this exercise? I hope so.

At this point, you should have a very important personal goal written down in front of you. Beneath it are a list of excuses and you’ve crossed out the ones that are bogus. You’re left with one or more excuses — which we’ll now call hurdles — that are stopping you from moving forward with your goal.

Hurdles can be jumped. Or knocked over if you’re not much of a jumper.

Say the hurdle is money — which it so often is. It’s time to do some research. What is achieving this goal going to cost? In your actual currency of choice?

Make some notes about what it’ll cost to get started. You’ll need to actually do some real research on this. Don’t guess. Work the web. Make some calls. Get some real data. Write it down.

So many things have costs up front and along the way. Let’s take the learn to fly example. Here are some of the steps along the way:

  1. Take a demo flight. Do this first to make sure you like it.
  2. Sign up for classes. (I highly recommend that you do not pay for all training up front, regardless of any discounts they might offer. I could write a whole blog post about that, but not today.)
  3. Obtain equipment you need: headset, chart, ground school training materials, etc. Keep in mind that you may be able to borrow some of this stuff or buy it second hand. That’ll save money.
  4. Take classes. There are different prices per hour for dual flight time and ground school time.
  5. Take tests. You need to pass a ground school test and there are test fees.
  6. Take more classes.
  7. Solo and get your solo flight time in.
  8. Take your flight test.

Did I forget anything? Probably. You will, too. But be as thorough as you can.

By the time you’re done and have added it all up, you might be freaking out. Don’t. Money is just a hurdle. And in most cases, you won’t need all of the money to achieve your goal up front. You can often pay as you go.

Snow Shoes
When I first moved here, I embraced winter. That was kind of silly.

Now it’s time to start brainstorming about ways to jump (or knock over) this hurdle. Look at your monthly spending. Where can you cut back? Can you reliably save $X per week or payday or month to cover the cost of this goal? I know folks don’t like it when people suggest cutting their coffee routine, but look at it realistically: if that latte costs $8 per day with a tip and you’re having it five days a week, that’s $40 a week and $160 a month. It doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up. What else can you cut? Streaming services? Magazine or software subscriptions? Dinner out? Car washes? Mani/pedi? Dog grooming? Happy hour gatherings? Weekend getaways? Lawn service? How about selling some of the crap in your garage or basement that you don’t need? That old exercise bike or set of cross country skis? (Or snowshoes? What was I thinking?)

How important is this goal to you? What are you willing to sacrifice to succeed?

Because sacrifice is what it’s all about. If you already have excuses for why you can’t do something, something has to change to make those excuses go away. You might have to give up something you currently have or do to move forward on what you want do do.

This is one example of one of the most common excuses for why we don’t do most things we want to do: money. We can’t afford it. Or we claim we can’t. But if we look long and hard at our current situation and way of life, maybe we can afford it — if we give up other things that aren’t as important.

Look at your excuses. Think about how you can get around them.

Trust me: if you want to do something badly enough, you can find ways to get around the hurdles.

Don’t Sit On Your Ass

I have to bring up my wasband here because my observations of him are a great example to share. My friend Jim hates when I mention my wasband in blog posts, but I was with the idiot for 29 years and it’s hard to avoid mentioning someone I was with for nearly half my life. (Hey, Jim? If you’re still reading these, skip ahead to the next section heading.)

My wasband wasn’t a dumb guy. From the day I met him in 1983, he impressed me with his apparent drive to do things with his life. He told me he was an inventor and he showed me the fiber optics he was playing with at the time. This was long before fiber optics became an important part of communications and almost a household word.

I say “apparent” — did you catch that? — because although he seemed ambitious and interested in chasing down his own personal goals, he never did. He never did anything with his fiber optic cable ideas. He never did anything with his solar power ideas. He never invented anything. When challenged about this, he claimed that designing the big, custom HVAC systems he did in his job as a manufacturer’s rep was “inventing.” Whatever.

Later in life, as I started and continued my journey down various career paths, I also started chasing down my own life goals. Learning to ride a motorcycle. Horseback riding and owning horses. Racing around lakes on jet skis. Learning to fly. In each case, I took the steps necessary to achieve a goal — for example, buying a motorcycle and signing up for motorcycle training — and he just followed. My goals became his goals. That was fine; it meant that we could do things together. But he never chased down his own goals. He didn’t seem to have any. Well, yeah, he did learn to fly a plane and even became a partner owning one, but he rarely flew it anywhere.

He told me once that he wanted to be a flight instructor in retirement. Great goal! Make it happen! (Ironically, that’s the phrase he repeatedly told me when our relationship and I were still young.) Making it happen meant building a certain number of flight hours. That was easy, considering he owned a plane hangared three miles away our home and we lived in AZ with near perfect weather all the time. It meant going back to flight school to become a commercial pilot and then getting his flight instructor rating. There was a clear path he needed to follow. He had the time, he had the plane, he had the money. But he didn’t do it. To this day, I don’t know why. I have to think that it just wasn’t that important to him.

Hangar
I seem to have a knack for cramming vehicles into large spaces. Here’s my Wickenburg hangar back in October 2011. You can see my helicopter, my fifth wheel (which I lived in every summer when I worked in Washington state), and my wasband’s plane along with the golf cart I used to pull the helicopter out. I purposely bought a trailer big enough for the two of us to do long-term travel in, but I don’t think he spent more than 20 nights in it.

He also told me that he wanted to open a bike shop. A place to sell and repair bicycles. This was later in our relationship, as we were getting older. My helicopter work was taking me to Washington state every summer, which was a great escape from Arizona’s heat. The area had an amazing 11-mile bike path along the river. I suggested building a mobile business based out of a trailer that could be brought up to a park near that bike path in the summer and brought back south in the winter. Yes, I was on call and needed to fly when it rained, but when it wasn’t raining, I could help him with rentals and other parts of the business. We could be together all year, even when I had to travel north to fly. In the winter, he could set up somewhere closer to home or just focus on sales and repairs. It seemed like a great plan, a way to help him achieve his goal. But did he do anything about it? No. Nothing. Nothing at all for any kind of bike shop business.

And I won’t even go into his failed attempt to start a solar power business. What a farce that was. It takes more than buying a two-line fax machine and sitting at a desk to get a business going.

So you might be wondering what he did instead of working on any of these goals. The answer is pretty simple. After work, he sat on his ass in front of the television, channel surfing. He claimed he needed to “unwind.” Either none of his goals were important enough for him to chase down or he simply wasn’t willing to make any sacrifices to achieve them.

When our relationship ended, he was bouncing from one 9-5 gig to another, rapidly aging his way out of the job market. I have no idea what he’s doing today, or if he’s even still alive.

Clearly, this was a man who wasn’t very serious about making anything happen.

Don’t Give Up without Trying

Why am I telling you about him? Because I don’t want you to be like him.

If you have a goal, whether it’s to develop a new skill, take a trip, change your career, or start a business, do something about it. Make it happen!

As I said in that post from 2016:

What I do want to touch on briefly here is the fact that just about all of us have it within our power to make things happen for ourselves.

But do you really want to wake up one day when you’re 56 years old and realize that your life is more than half over and you haven’t achieved what you wanted to? (I think that’s what happened to my wasband; it pretty much caused him to lose his mind in a midlife crisis that went horribly wrong.) We only have one life. Why would you let it go by without at least trying to achieve your dreams?

Please. Do this for yourself.