Award-Winning Journalist & Speaker - Expert in ERISA Fiduciary, Child IRA, and Hamburger History
Competition is good. It’s the bread and butter of every successful team, organization, and nation. Not because it crushes the weak, but because it reveals who we are. It pushes the best to heights never before imagined. It weeds out those who are better suited for critical supporting roles.
Think of the purpose of competition not as a cruel arbiter of the human condition, but as a vast casting call. Every great story needs a Continue Reading “Why Competition Is Good (And What Mrs. Fish Knew)”
It’s that time again. The quadrennial event. The Winter Olympics. And you know what that means.
Men’s ice hockey.
That and curling. My most favorite things to watch. But that’s not all we watch.
Before going out with friends, Peter decided to start playing the movie Miracle. Again.
He had no intention of watching the entire film. When I asked him why, he said, “You and Mom will watch it to the end.”
He was right.
He likes the beginning. It’s a montage of news stories from the 1970s. If you were to choose one word to describe it, it would be “malaise.” I lived through it. Betsy lived through it. It’s spot on. Even Peter sees it. And he was born two decades after the events. That’s how effective the beginning is.
Of course, it’s also effective at other things.
Too effective.
And it gets worse every time.
As soon as the young players appear at the hockey training center, the time machine clicks inside my head. I see the faces. I hear their voices. I watch their semi-serious banter.
And I begin to cry silently.
Not for me.
For them.
(Did you hear that melancholy sigh?)
It’s the faces. I know them—or knew them. I knew them all.
Not the actors you see on the screen. But the faces behind the faces. And the voices behind the voices.
I recognize something. Something that pierces deep into my heart. Not the celebrity. Not the history. No, I see the guys I actually knew. The carefree band of brothers who defined my transition from teenage years to adulthood.
For those who don’t know, yes, I met everyone in Miracle in real life. It would be a stretch to say I “knew” them. In fact, I had more in common (and more conversation) with Herb Brooks than with any of his players. There’s an intriguing story behind the whole event, which occurred at an exhibition hockey game in December 1979 between the 1980 US Olympic team and Yale’s Hockey Team (see “Nobody Knew: When ‘The Miracle’ Touched Greater Western New York,” Mendon-Honeoye Fall-Lima Sentinel, February 27, 2020).
Here’s what I remember most about that event. I remember being the fly on the wall (almost literally, as Herb Brooks and I leaned lazily against the paneled wall like the wallflowers we were). I watched the players from both teams interact. In retrospect, I was watching Miracle as it actually happened. The way the players carried themselves. The ordinary confidence. The playful banter. The modest swagger.
They were equals. They weren’t Olympic legends. They weren’t Yale men. They were regular guys. Playing the game they love.
They were like me. Like you. Like your friends. Not trying to be famous. Just wanting to get into the game.
That was life before the Miracle — before history gave it a name.
And that’s the most important takeaway. We weren’t looking to make a splash. We just wanted to be let into the pool.
Such is the lament of the second wave of Baby Boomers—what some call “Generation Jones.” This is the younger half. The quiet half. The half that didn’t burn draft cards. That didn’t march in the streets. But we inherited the aftershocks of our older cohort.
We inherited hand-me-downs, cultural fatigue, and a stereotype of a louder time.
We weren’t aiming to change the world. We just wanted a good job, a good family, and good friends. Just a decent shot.
We just wanted to “play hockey.”
That’s what I see captured in the eyes of those Miracle boys. I look through the actors and to a time in life when the future was wide open, dreams were assumed, and time was abundant.
The burden of age has replaced expectation with reality. We see what really happened. We see whose dreams drifted into oblivion. We see who quietly fought a never-ending battle that would ultimately consume them. We see who never got the shot they hoped for—the one they believed was promised.
And that’s why the movie hurts more. I’m not watching victory. I’m watching expectation. I’m feeling what they thought life would be.
But I’m experiencing it all through a lens that has proven how hard life can be.
Again.
I weep for the Forgotten Boomers.
They weren’t radicals. They weren’t revolutionaries. They didn’t seek headlines.
They were steady. Stalwart. Work-hard-and-go-home.
While others searched for causes, we embraced responsibility.
We didn’t perform conviction. We lived it.
And we didn’t care about what anyone thought. We cared about what we thought of ourselves. And that we remained true to our moral compass.
But here’s the question no one asks: Does a generation that refuses to advertise its virtues get credit for having them? Or is that the actual virtue?
This was us in our early twenties. We stayed under the radar. We didn’t shout. We didn’t protest. We just worked. That was our guiding light.
And that was our Miracle.
Not Lake Placid.
Not Al Michaels.
But the quiet generation inside the noisy one. The ones who raised families, showed up for work, took care of business, didn’t complain, and didn’t ask for applause.
And when the time finally came for us to emerge from our cocoon, we did. We started businesses. We invigorated civic organizations, clubs, and fraternities. When the time came for us to take a larger role in our churches, we did.
In short, when asked to serve, well, that was just part of our job. It wasn’t for the glory. It was something more.
Seeing that youthful optimism and hope in Miracle brings it all back.
Again.
I cry not because it is gone, but because it was real—and so many deserved more.
Ironically, the anticlimax of Miracle speaks to the anticlimax of its real meaning. In the movie, beating the Soviets in the semi-final stands as the high point. Beating Finland for the gold was merely an afterthought.
But gold was the real goal, wasn’t it? The movie doesn’t make it seem that way.
In that moment, as the final credits roll, I realize a greater understanding, a greater appreciation for the boys of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey team. They didn’t become legends in the NHL. They became men. They went to work. Many ended up working in the financial services industry—just like the rest of us from that era.
Maybe the Forgotten Boomers were never meant to be the headline. Maybe we were meant to be the backbone.
And maybe the real Miracle wasn’t beating the Soviets. It was who we were before the Miracle, before the world noticed. It was becoming the men we said we would be.
Quietly.
Without cameras.
Without applause.
Scott Adams did more than create a popular cartoon that spoke to a generation of office workers. source: Art of Charm, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s a popular Hollywood trope: a “dead” man lives to see his own funeral. He’s fascinated by the reactions of those around him. Sometimes, he’s pleasantly surprised. Sometimes sorrowfully depressed. Sometimes downright angry. Depending on the movie, it’s either a fake death or a supernatural out-of-body experience.
As with most things, it all depends on what you’re watching.
And that, in a nutshell, summarizes the wisdom of Scott Adams.
The popular cartoonist—an ex-engineer with an MBA—turned his front-line experience into a practical philosophy, one useful both in business and in life. A trained hypnotist, he became a serious student of persuasion. He then blossomed into a master scholar. Of course, it was only a matter of time that his expansive talent stack would get him into trouble.
In 2015, long before the usual chattering class, Adams used his persuasion lens to quickly Continue Reading “Scott Adams’ (Very) Public Wake”
There’s a reason your car doesn’t enjoy driving in the city (or Henrietta). Too many red lights. Vehicles can’t stand all that stopping and restarting. That’s what red lights force them to do. Cars hate it. And it kills your miles per gallon, too.
What red lights do to cars, Mondays do to you.
Think about it. Why has no other day been as universally panned as Monday? From Garfield’s primordial meme—“I hate Mondays”—to the Carpenters’ immortal “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” the first day of the week has always borne the brunt of criticism.
Unlike what the calendar implies, Sunday is not really the first day of the week. For those unfamiliar with the Bible, the Lord’s Day is the seventh day of creation; ergo, the seventh day of the week.
But even if you go by your day planner, at the very least, Monday remains the first day of Continue Reading “Too Many Mondays”
The Game. For generations, it has been referred to as that. Not the “Yale Harvard game” (or alternatively, depending on your home team, the “Harvard game” or the “Yale game”). No. It’s simply “The Game.”
That tells you everything you need to know. There may be other contests throughout the fall sports season. There may be other seasons throughout the year. But only one singular event towers above all. It is the ultimate game (or at least it used to be—but more on that in a moment) of the Ivy League football season. It is the world’s second-longest continuous football rivalry (behind only Yale-Princeton). Students, alumni, and affiliates of New Haven and Cambridge eagerly await the finale between Yale and Harvard.
But it’s not just “a” game; it is “the” game, as in “The Game.”
People don’t go merely to watch a classic eleven-on-eleven gridiron clash. They go for Continue Reading “To The Tables Down At Yorkside… (Wherever That May Be)”
Forbidden Planet movie poster, Copyrighted by Loew’s International. Artists(s) not known., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Down below stretched the New York Central’s vast sun-bathed Seneca Yard. As far as my four-year-old eyes could see, the many trains slow-danced with smooth precision. Colors. Shapes. Mesmerizing! “When I grow up, I want to be like the man who owned all these trains,” I told my mother. “Why?” she asked. Without hesitation, I said, “Because he must be rich!”
Yet, hours later, I sat with my father and watched our small black-and-white TV. News of the latest NASA manned rocket launch captivated me. I moved closer to take in all the details. Countdown. Fiery thrust. Liftoff! I spun around and said, “Dad, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut.” “Why?” “Because it must be fun!”
Would you rather preserve the past or forge the future? Or is that the wrong question? Yesterday’s lessons and tomorrow’s dreams don’t collide in the present—they converge.
Longtime readers know my split soul: classic fallen-flag railroads and space exploration. Born fifty years too late—or fifty years too early. Yet, here I am, existing in the limbo between rails and rockets—and I wouldn’t trade it.
Consider how differently they move—and how each shapes how we think. Trains vs. rockets. Rails vs. launch windows. Memory vs. momentum.
Trains offer little flexibility—you’re confined to the fixed rails they run on. You know the route, trust the schedule, and sleep easy. There are no surprises. For example, New York Central’s premier passenger train, the 20th Century Limited (1902–1967), was famously on time—often to the minute.
That precision breeds confidence. Sure, there might be delays, but the interconnectedness of things makes it less likely that the entire system will collapse. Short of a catastrophe. And even then, the rails remain.
Flipping the script, space travel is literally limitless—the whole “to infinity and beyond.” You can reach into the unknown and “boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s thrilling. It’s liberating. It’s also a little dangerous. You never know what alien landscapes might reveal.
But aliens may be the least of your worries. It’s a Twilight Zone–like twist: the real danger isn’t aliens. It’s you. The temptation to wander takes you off the beaten track (pun intended). It can also take your mind off the ball. Mission drift. Failure mode. One detour and you’re lost in the void.
You don’t have to be a Dr. Dolittle to see how this pushmi-pullyu dynamic works. Preserve the past? Or forge the future? It’s a constant tug-of-war. It’s enough to drive you crazy.
How does this false choice play out in the real world? In Hollywood-speak, should we opt for the sure thing of endless sequels until the characters become monotonous, or should we instead risk creating a brand-new story?
But wait—that’s still binary thinking. Instead of either/or, it’s more of a yin/yang engine. The past is the fuel. The future is the fire. Together, they launch you forward.
Exit Hollywood. Enter Elizabethan theater. Shakespeare’s The Tempest debuted in 1611. The first scene of Act 2 features Antonio uttering the phrase, “What’s past is prologue.” His meaning is quite deceptive. He seeks to convince Sebastian to commit murder because the Fates—history—have set the stage for just such an act.
Ironically, the original meaning of the phrase “What’s past is prologue” has not been preserved. It has morphed into a more literal interpretation. Whereas its original use called upon the classical gods of fate, today it simply refers to how our historical past can reveal our future. Think Napoleon’s winter in Russia—and Hitler’s, a century later.
Philosopher George Santayana famously summed this up when he warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Not quite as pithy as Shakespeare, but just as memorable. And it has more bite than “if you are mindful of the past, you will plan better for the future.” That’s what the Greek rhetorician Isocrates advised Cyprian Prince Nicocles in the 4th century BC. It’s not fate. It’s pattern recognition.
It’s not just empires. It’s your life, too. “History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This oft-repeated quote, attributed (probably wrongly) to Mark Twain1, embodies this key idea: the past gives us echoes, if not exact replicas. We can learn from the spirit of the past without being bound by its letter.
When “the past is prologue,” then “the future is now.” This latter phrase implies the future is happening right before our very eyes. We might not recognize it until sometime later. As with rocket ships, the future launches to sites unknown. Unburdened by the unmoving iron path of the rail, the future wanders from the straight line into a world—or pattern of thought—no one ever expects (like the Spanish Inquisition).
Just like the future, the “Spanish Inquisition” non sequitur came out of nowhere. To some extent, the same could be said of the entire Mark Twain footnote.
The future is all about these unexpected turns—the rabbit holes that make discovery possible. You can’t schedule serendipity. You can’t plot creativity on rails. But you can learn to recognize when you’ve stumbled onto something valuable—and that recognition comes from pattern, from memory, from the past.
It’s not a choice between preserving the past and forging the future. These are not distinct world lines—separate timelines that never touch, like mainline tracks that run parallel forever. Rather, they represent an interconnected mosaic that converges in the present. We look to the rails of the past to jump into the future. It’s like taking a hit radio series and adapting it for TV (like The Lone Ranger—a 1933 radio hit reborn as a 1949 television series). Same story. New medium.
Or like using Elizabethan prose (say, The Tempest) as the launching pad of a classic sci-fi spectacle (Forbidden Planet).
The old becomes fuel for the new. It’s the ultimate in recycling.
What does this mean for you?
Study the rails. Pack the rocket.
That four-year-old on the bridge understood something profound: the trains below weren’t relics—they were launching pads. The astronaut dreams didn’t replace the railroad dreams. They were fueled by them.
The past isn’t prologue.
It’s propellant.
1 Here’s what Twain really said: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
Well, either Twain or his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner said that in The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, the 1874 novel that they co-wrote. Some years later, Twain wrote, “no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.”
If you’re interested, the closest approximation of the “rhyme” quote comes from a 1965 essay by psychologist Theodor Reik, who wrote: “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.” This is the likely original source of the “rhyme” quote, as it wasn’t until the January 25, 1970, edition of the New York Times that the quote was first attributed to Twain. Did the Times try to preserve the past that wasn’t?
I’ve learned how to spot AI content because I’m never sure if a potential source is real or a computer. Well, not exactly. It’s usually easy to confirm the person is real.
Financial professionals often have public footprints. I find them by perusing firm bios, scrolling LinkedIn’s polished profiles, and searching for prior quotes. A business email helps, too. I rarely consider replies from generic addresses like Gmail or Yahoo.
The problem isn’t the people. It’s their answers. Are they genuine—or pasted from a GenAI platform?
Last Monday, I opened an email from a “retirement planning expert” responding to my Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part VI: How To Spot AI Content – Or – Apparently, I Am A Robot”
When generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) platforms first appeared, I tried them all. GenAI fails—but not in the way you’re thinking. They failed to collect the data I requested. Quite simply, the platforms couldn’t search the internet that well.
Ah, 2024. Those were the good old days…
Code that tapped LLMs did achieve—a bit—what I wanted, but the inconsistency drove me Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part V: Why GenAI (And All Search Engines) Fail”
After moderating the panel, I rushed to gather my materials. The large crowd buzzed in the afterglow of satisfaction. A woman came up to me and said, “I hope you’re still on the radio.” The comment stunned me. It seemed to come out of nowhere.
Then I remembered. We had only one microphone. It was on a cord. My vision for the panel was more of a conversation than a series of mini-presentations. Passing a mic between each panelist would stunt the informal back-and-forth I wanted to achieve. What could I do?
When the panel began, I asked each person to speak without a microphone to test if the audience in the back of the room could hear us. They could, so I told everyone we wouldn’t be using the mic. That’s when a lady sitting in the front said, “Will you be able to keep your voice loud? Whenever a presenter decides to go without a mic, they start loud, but their voice invariably gets quieter as the presentation goes on.”
I stopped dead in my tracks, looking at her straight in the eye. Then, channeling my inner Continue Reading “The Compliment That Caught Me Speechless”
Did you ever have a dream you kept putting off? A place you always wanted to visit? A story you always wanted to tell?
So did I. (Notice the past tense.)
This site might give you a clue about how I accomplished this. Who knows? It may even reveal to you how you can realize your own greatest goals.
Interested in learning more? Find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
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Only Heels Can Be Heroes Redux
Sometimes, nothing more than timing.
On our thirty-seventh anniversary, it’s fitting to revisit the very first Carosa Commentary that appeared in the inaugural issue of The Sentinel.
This is in the same vein as “No Guts, No Glory.”
Essentially, Heels and Heroes are made of the same stuff. Only the outcome of their deeds is different (or at least viewed differently). Ultimately, the critical factor leading to the labeling of a man (or woman) may be nothing more than luck.Continue Reading “Only Heels Can Be Heroes Redux”