I deliver a lot of speeches. As part of my preparation I always look around at what other people are doing. Today I came across this video that I think is brilliant. The speaker is entertaining. His topic is something from which everyone can learn. Click here to watch.

I was driving home from my sister’s house this weekend which takes me over the George Washington Bridge and along the Cross Bronx Expressway. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of driving this stretch of roadway, allow me to describe it. I believe the essence can best be captured by saying that this is New York City’s armpit. It flows through some unattractive neighborhoods. There’s a ton of traffic complete with pan handlers in the spots where it slows down the most. There’s graffiti. There are potholes galore. It’s not a stretch I would drive if there were another reasonable alternative.

At one point during this stretch we went through a tunnel where they had built a building above the roadway. There were lots of lights and my four year-old in the backseat said, “pretty.” Just that. Pretty.

In Three Deep Breaths, a book I find to be absolutely brilliant, Tom Crum describes three breaths you can take to achieve greater inner peace. In the third breath you let go of judgment and breathe in mystery. For me mystery has two parts. There is the unknown that creates anxiety if we fear it and excitement if we do not hold that fear. There is also beauty that we take for granted if we don’t consciously choose to see it, explore it and soak it in.

My daughter saw that twinkling lights in the night time were pretty and in so doing reminded me to see more beauty in the world.

I have to admit that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with holiday gift giving. Watching kids open up presents is usually entertaining and heart warming. That’s the part I love.

Watching adults open up presents is often awkward and even painful. In my experience adults just rarely know what to get for other adults. And of course it is the thought that counts and I am appreciative of receiving a gift. But wouldn’t it be nice if we got the gifts we wanted?

I don’t need another argyle sweater. In fact, I don’t need the first one I got last holiday season. Then there is the wonderful memory of the year that all the cousins and aunts and uncles in my wife’s family exchanged $50 gift cards. They actually agreed - this year, no presents, only gift cards. It was like everyone simply handed $50 to the person on their left. This seems to me like a system that’s broken.

Five years ago I came up with the answer. It was a website that I wanted to call GiftORama.com. It would be a universal gift registry site so that anytime - holidays, birthdays, any occasion - you wanted to buy a gift for someone you could see a list of items they actually wanted to receive.

Well, instead of creating GiftORama, I started a consulting company. I missed out on my billion dollar idea. But someone has finally put together a website that does a decent job of what I wanted to do five years ago. It is www.wishlist.com.

They are still working out some of the kinks, but it’s good enough to use. So I apologize for not getting this out in time for this holiday season, but now you have a whole year to build up your wishlist in preparation for December, 2008.

BTW, here are some of the slogans I came up with when I first hatched the idea of GiftORama:

If you want it, and you want someone else to buy it . . . GiftORama.com
If you want to give, and you want them to love it . . . GiftORama.com
If you want her to cry tears of joy . . . GiftORama.com
If you are not sure if she already has it . . . GiftORama.com
If you don’t want to give him another tie . . . GiftORama.com
If you don’t want another pair of fuzzy bunny slippers . . . GiftORama.com

And my personal favorite:

If you don’t want to spend your own money, spend someone else’s . . . GiftORama.com

My brother got married yesterday, and as expected it was a wonderful and joyous occasion. I agonized quite a bit over the best man speech but in the end it turned out pretty well. When I reflected on it there were a few comments from my speech that are worth sharing. So below is the transcript, minus the parts that would terribly humiliate my big brother. (He owes me.)

*************

Hello everyone. Thank you for coming. And thank you to Joan and Monroe for putting together this wonderful wedding.

It is my great pleasure today to toast my brother and his new bride Carolyn. As I was thinking about what to say one question kept coming back to me, “How can I help Carolyn and Daniel in their marriage to one another?” What insights can I give them? So I’d like to share with you three pieces of advice: one for Daniel, one for Carolyn and one for both.

First, what wisdom can I impart to Dan about being a husband? Originally I was going to tell you that the husband is always wrong. But I tested the speech on my wife, and she told me I was wrong. Of course, she was right.

It’s not that husbands are always wrong. It’s that life is a whole lot better when you concede, tell her she’s beautiful, and offer to rub her shoulders than it is when you fight over who is right.

And to Carolyn. What insights can I give you about my brother?

[Sorry. This is the segment with the embarrassing stories about my brother. For those you’ll have to find a black market copy of the wedding video.]

And finally, this is for both of you. (And I invite any other couples, married or otherwise to play along with this.) First, Daniel and Carolyn. Hold hands. Give a little squeeze. Look into each other’s eyes. And think of five moments you have shared that brought you great happiness. Today might supply one or all of those moments. Take a moment now and think of these five times that you have shared that brought you happiness.

It has been found that when married couples have five times more positive interactions than negative, they are far more likely to stay together. In every marriage there will be sadness and anger. At those times, remember the five moments you just brought to mind. Talk about them. Relive them. And stay happy together.

Daniel, my brother, I love you. Carolyn, I am thrilled to welcome you into my family. I wish you both a wonderful and happy life together.

Mazel tov.

******************

Last night (9/11) was an odd night to give a speech, but there I was. Before I went on several participants shared stories about 9/11. One of them really lays open the raw emotion that is still attached to 9/11 for New Yorkers. I don’t know if this is how things are in the rest of the country, but here is what happened yesterday in NY.

It was pouring. Traffic was miserable. (It always is in NY in the rain.) There was a cop on Amsterdam and 110th Street in full dress uniform directing traffic. In the pouring rain driver after driver stopped their cars, rolled down their windows, and reached out to thank the police officer and shake his hand.

Another participant commented that 9/11 creates a spirit in New York akin to the Christmas season. We are kinder, more giving, and more patient on this most difficult of all days. For me, this is the greatest triumph - for NY, the US, and the human spirit - we could possibly achieve. If we are the Whos down in Whoville, turning the anniversary of tragedy into a day of kindness and generosity, we have truly won.

The internet connects people in remarkable ways. However, it also leaves a huge portion of the population feeling left out. It’s like high school all over again. You know there is a party going on, but you don’t where. On the internet a new video or website or blog will suddenly get enormous attention and even bring new ideas, phrases or products into mainstream culture.

But how do you know where to find these new fads so you can keep up with (or even lead) the water cooler talk?

Check out www.mahalo.com. At the bottom of the page is a link to “Internet Zeitgeist.” Check it out. It shows you what’s gone viral on the web.

I also happen to think that as a search engine, it is a wonderful site in general. To learn more about it, check out the Fast Company article.

I generally avoid writing about anything political, but today I feel compelled. I think the story speaks for itself, so please click here for the NPR report.

After reading, if you wish to lend your voice to the situation, check out this site.

I will offer a post soon with a more optimistic look at the opportunities that are being presented to some youths today.

The lobby was spotless. The front desk was standard. New. Clean. Nice. But standard. What’s your name? Who are you here to see? Photo ID please. We were then issued the requisite visitor’s passes. That’s when the normalcy disappeared and my excitement escalated.

The normalcy went away when I realized that the elevator didn’t have any buttons inside. My colleagues had entered our destination on the keypad outside the elevator. After that we had to put our trust in the machine hoping it would deposit us at our desired destination. Fortunately, the elevator performed its job well.

As I walked into the offices on the 37th floor of the new 7 World Trade Center building in downtown Manhattan I felt that I had come full circle. In order to explain that I have to back up two years.

In October 2005 I completed work on the book proposal for You’re Addicted to You. At the time a friend of mine had recently gotten a deal with a big publishing company to publish her book. I thought I was all set. I had an in. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Connections.

I sent my friend’s editor my proposal, and I waited. My polite follow-up emails were responded to with polite still-haven’t-had-time-to-look-at-it emails. Still, I had the connection. Everything would work out. Then I read the November, 2005 issue of my favorite magazine, Fast Company, in which they described Berrett-Koehler, a small publishing company in San Francisco.

The company sounded too good to be true. Book publishing is an industry in which publishers own all the power, current authors are tolerated nuisances, and anyone not yet published (whose name doesn’t happen to be Clinton) is valued about as highly as gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Yet, Berrett-Koehler (BK for short) was breaking all of those rules.

They partnered with their authors on decisions that other companies made unilaterally like cover design and title. They offered their authors an unheard of out-clause in the contracts that allowed the authors to take their books to another publisher if they became dissatisfied with BK. Oh, and by the way, their books sold more copies on average than the other companies that treated authors so poorly.

This was a no-brainer. BK was the publisher for me. So before I lost my nerve I printed off a copy of my proposal and mailed it to BK – no cover letter, no introduction, no connections, over the transom. Then I waited. And sweated.

On December 5th, the day before my birthday, I received two phone calls. My friend’s editor phoned to tell me she had finally reviewed my proposal. They were going to pass. Then BK called to tell me my dream had come true. They wanted to publish my book. My euphoria was tempered only by the reality choking deadline that I had to deliver my first draft in four months, but that’s another story.

The story here is that this never would have happened if I hadn’t read that magazine article. So when I walked off the elevator into the new corporate headquarters for Fast Company magazine, I had come full circle.

I was there to take a tour of their new offices, which feature wonderful open architecture, all glass walls to allow natural light throughout, and meeting nooks in prime window-front real estate. The building is also gold-level green-certified which is fitting for a magazine which trumpets social and environmental consciousness in business.

Towards the end of the tour the guide showed me and my colleagues their library, and there on the shelf was a gleaming copy of You’re Addicted to You. A second dream was fulfilled for me that day. I saw my book inside Fast Company. Of course, it wasn’t in an article in the actual magazine yet. But it was over the transom, and that’s a start.

Not everyone is a born salesperson. This doesn’t surprise me. However, when you are selling the most valuable asset you will ever own, I would think you would put at least 12 seconds of thought into it. I honestly believe that is all it would take to realize that you shouldn’t leave a pile of dirty dishes in the sink when you are taking pictures of your kitchen for display on the internet. My wife and I are looking at houses and we have been astounded by how little people do to prepare their homes for sale.

Before you think this post is all about home sales, allow me to make this point. We all sell. We sell products, services or ideas at work. We sell suggestions to our significant others and our kids. We are always selling.

All I’m suggesting is that before you take a picture of your home or start explaining a request to your kid, you should take 12 seconds to think about the sale. I encountered five pictures in particular that could not possibly have been considered for 12 seconds.

1. I already told you about the sink piled high with dishes.
2. A picture so blurry I couldn’t tell if it was a living room or a water buffalo.
3. A closeup of a toilet. No kidding. Nothing else in the picture but the inside of the bowl.
4. A close up of a flower. Now I’m not an expert on these things, but what exactly is supposed to happen when I see a picture of a flower? Should I forget that the owner neglected to include pictures of the kitchen?
5. And this one is truly remarkable. A photo of water damage.

I’m just asking for 12 seconds. Is that so much to ask?

This week I heard what I thought was the best book statistic ever. I know that Harry Potter is a huge phenomenon. In fact, I joked around with people saying that this past weekend JK Rowling and I averaged 4 million book sales each. Still, this took me by surprise. There was a study released in a British journal of medicine that said that on weekends following the release of a Harry Potter book children’s admittances to emergency rooms in England fell by 50%.

Wow. Very cool.