My wife and a few friends of hers were doing a kind of cleanse this past week, which is a nice way of saying they were eating things they would not otherwise choose to eat. To her credit, she never suggested that I join her, thus saving me from coming...

My friend Matt is one of those guys who loves to debate. Case in point, he is a fierce defender of smokers. Which would be fine except that he, personally, finds cigarette smoke practically vomit-inducing. I challenged him frequently on this.

"Each cigarette takes something like eleven minutes off your...

Bill and Carrie go to our church. My wife and I adore Carrie. She's not just smart and funny - she's also one of those women who you imagine may have a heart that is literally made out of gold bullion.

Carrie's husband, Bill, is around my age --...

About a month ago, my wife and I were sitting on padded folding chairs in the offices of our church, about an hour into the monthly Planning Team meeting. Walt was talking, which meant one thing: we had reached the financial report part of the meeting. Not coincidentally, it was...

Last February, I found myself in Atlanta, sitting next to three other authors. We were scheduled to speak to a large gathering of university folks who were looking for interesting and inspiring books to give to their first year students. I was slated to speak second.

I didn't think...

I used to be so scared of public speaking that, before going on stage, I would literally look around for somewhere to throw up. Needless to say, my friends learned to encourage me whilst staying safely out of the blast zone.

Then I ended up starting an organization in Nepal...

I'm a political junkie, which is okay because it's the one kind of junkie that people don't seem to mind having around their kids. Presidential politics is addictive in much the same way reality TV show is addictive; it's The Bachelor for the American electorate. Mitt Romney even looks like...

Bill Silber is something of a legend at the NYU Stern School of Business. He is so good at his job that when Stern students go for interviews at investment banks, the interviewer will ask if they took Professor Silber's introduction to finance. If they did, it's an indication that...

I'm not one for galas. Even the word itself -- gala -- sounds preposterously formal, as if the mere mention should be accompanied by men on ramparts, blowing those long horns with the flags.

Still, I found myself attending a gala a few months ago, thrown by the surprisingly down-to-earth...

While giving a speech to a prep school in New York, I was asked an awesome question by a high school senior looking to volunteer in an orphanage. He was concerned about the application question that asked the student to describe their motivation for volunteering.

Now, bear in mind...

In Nepal, there is a child trafficker named Golkka. By most estimates, he has trafficked over a thousand children into slavery and institutions.

If you ask him (I happen to know) he would say that he has trafficked none. He would say that he is helping the children escape a...

By now, you've at least pondered the question.

Did Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, really stumble into the village of Korphe in 1993 after a failed attempt at K2? Was he really kidnapped by the Taliban? Is Mr. Mortenson using Central Asia Initiative (CAI) as his "personal...

A funny thing happens when you volunteer -- lives are changed whether you know it or not. It doesn't matter how much time you put into it, or whether you ever go back to volunteer there ever again. Quite simply, there is a chain reaction happening that we don't really...

Watching the revolution and violence in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya, I'm reminded of volunteering in Nepal during the civil war, and the events leading up to the violent revolution in 2006 when the people overthrew the monarchy.

We volunteer because we want to help. We want to lend our...

For the first 29 years of my life, Valentine's Day was the most imposing of holidays.

Every year, I was either single or with a girlfriend that I knew things probably weren't going to work out with. It didn't help that walking into a mall in early February was...

I never really wanted to volunteer. Not that I told anyone that, of course. What I actually wanted was to be able to say I volunteered -- to be the kind of person who volunteered. I wanted, in short, to impress people. I figured if I volunteered just once, I...