The Simpleton Blog

What is the difference between wrestling someone and fighting them? One of my absolute favorite things to do as a father is to wrestle with my boys. And I’ll tell you - my daughter Maggie is the baby, but she throws herself in there with reckless abandon. It’s really the closest you can get to your kids, physically - right? Just wrestling with my little guys. Anybody here wrestle with their kids? I don’t even have to do anything to initiate it - I can be on the other side of

I wanted to start this morning out with a question - it sounds easy, but I think it’s a trickier question than you might expect. I want to ask, “How much does your integrity cost?” There’s an old story about Theodore Roosevelt before he was president, he spent some time as a rancher. And one of his cowboys lassoed a maverick steer, and was getting ready to brand the steer. Now the part of the range that they were on was claimed by Roosevelt’s neighbor Gregor Lang. According t

I grew up in a home with two working parents. My mother, who ironically is named Ruth, she started her own business before I was born. She was a dentist for a lot of years - running her own practice in a suburb of Detroit called Grosse Pointe, which is where she met my dad. And both of my parents are absolute workaholics - I definitely get it from somewhere. And in our house, work was how you oriented life. You achieved and that’s what gave you value - you set goals, go after

So this past week, I threw up a prompt on an app called “Threads” - which is basically just Facebook’s version of Twitter. And here’s what I said, [put screenshot on the screen]  “hey help me out - what’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever had with your kids?” And I love doing stuff like that because the comments never disappoint. There was one where a lady was driving with her child in the back seat and they drove past a police car pulled over next to a traffic accide