Author: Steve Ainslie

About 10 years ago, when catching a flight home from a business trip, I was randomly assigned TSA Precheck on my boarding pass. I didn’t even notice until I entered the TSA security area and was directed to the Precheck line which had a handful of people in it thus skipping the 100+ people queued…

My Dad taught me to swim when I was 5 years old. I watched him do the breaststroke wearing a mask and picked it up immediately. I was thrilled! After being the little kid who could only splash around in the shallows I became a little underwater frog exploring the bottom of the pool, the…

There’s a hot woman who has been swimming at the pool around the same time I do in the mornings. Unlike me and most of the other regulars, she’s in her 30s or 40s, has a fit, tan, tone body and swims like a trained athlete. So of course, I notice her. Her swimming is…

I have spent most of my life engaging with friends, family members, neighbors, classmates, coworkers and acquaintances. Some of these were people I would not have chosen to spend time with. However, like most of us, I didn’t always have a choice in the matter. Generally, I got along with most people. If it became…

On a stepparent subreddit I read a post that asked if widowed stepparents maintained contact with their adult stepchildren after their spouse had died. Many of the responders had been active stepparents who helped raise their non-biological kids when they were younger. When younger, the stepchildren had lived with them full-time or part-time under shared…

This week, in response to a user request, I setup a meetup section in the Solo Community forum for several major cities (Denver, DC, London, NYC). Within a few hours, I received a dozen more requests from members asking to have one created for their region. We ended up with 19 metro areas across six…

When I was in school, I absolutely loved math until I reached calculus in the 12th grade. Numbers have always made sense to me. Addition and subtraction in elementary school were a breeze. Then when I was introduced to multiplication, division, fractions and decimals my mind was blown. Algebra intuitively made sense to me. I…

I was listening to Morgan Housel’s podcast last week when he talked about people making decisions based on emotions vs. reason. Although he was speaking about decisions regarding finances, spending, investing and lifestyle inflation, I drew immediate parallels regarding almost every decision people make. He said, “When someone makes a decision based on emotions you…

There are many times when I wonder, “Am I the only person who is thinking this?“ And so on. We could all add a dozen more examples. But this post isn’t about me listing my frustrations with other people. It is about me thinking, “Doesn’t anybody else see this?” What I have learned is that…

The Covid pandemic taught me a lesson about big numbers – you should not rely on them without validating the source of the data. When you dig just a little bit deeper behind the numbers, you will often discover the numbers are estimates, extrapolations from a small sample size, attributed erroneously as “hard data” and…