In The Essence of Happiness the Dalai Lama says that when negative people enter our lives we should treat those intrusions as opportunities to practise tolerance. Our exercise should be to try and replace that anger with serenity. Even though it is hard to do, when it does happen the sense of achievement brings a smile to the face and a load off the heart. In Dear Didi’s column in Desi News, we often read about the stresses that family interferences cause for some readers. In other newspaper columns we read about serious problems caused by relatives, friends and co-workers.Anxieties with extended family members and co-workers can cause sustained stress. Sometimes...

Shortly after buying my first house, I discovered that my next door neighbour tended to overreact to any dilemma.His name was Joe, and I started thinking of him as Overkill Joe, and later simply Joverkill.For example, Joverkill found that he had squirrels living in his attic. It was no surprise to me that he had more squirrels in his yard than anyone else on the street. He had two lovely nut trees growing at either end of his house. In his front yard was a beautiful oak tree. A perfect shade tree, if I ever did see one; and in the fall it was laden with acorns. In his back yard was a huge pecan tree that I was particularly fond of because it would drop about a half bushel of pecans on my...

As an executive for many years, and like many of you who are executives, my philosophy was always to work hard, often until late at night, show up for work early in the morning and do everything I could to uphold the vision, mission and values of the organization.Another strong belief I held was that just as every child in school has a gift that we as teachers must find and nurture, so too every employee has a positive strength that we must try to find and maximize.Whenever a problem arose it was important to sit with each side separately, listen, listen, listen and then when enough information had been gleaned, sit the two parties together and try to arrive at a win-win solution that would...

A recent spate of fake  news has gotten everyone in a tizzy. But, this isn’t news – phony stories have been around forever.It’s just that the internet is delivering them faster, in greater quantities, and to more people than ever before. Fake news is a virus of the information age. We inoculate ourselves with skepticism. The net result is that people have lost their trust in authority. And, I believe this is a good thing.The opportunity to deceive people online began almost immediately. On July 5, 1993, The New Yorker magazine published Peter Steiner’s cartoon of a dog sitting in front of a computer with the now famous caption: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a...

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded – here and there, now and then – are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. “Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. “This is known as ‘bad luck.” So said Robert Heinlein.Your boss, your coworkers, your friends, and even your family don’t want you to be creative. They resent your trying to change the methods, practices, systems, and rules they are...