The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 15 | June 6, 2026 Hello Reader, There's a quote you've probably seen attributed to Picasso: "The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away." It's not actually Picasso — it's most credibly traced to a psychiatrist named David Viscott — but that's not what interests me about it. What interests me is that it's not even the full quote. The version that circulates drops the middle line. What was originally written reads:...
about 6 hours ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Heather Jo Kennedy didn’t hedge the subtitle of her book. Not “principles of productivity you might be overlooking” or “probably overlooking.” Just: principles of productivity you’re overlooking. Full stop. And she’s right. Every principle in the book is almost too simple to take seriously... which is exactly why most of us walk right past them. Gratitude. Identity. Clarity. Finishing. The basics we assume we’ve already handled because they don’t feel sophisticated enough to be...
about 22 hours ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, There's a day for everything now, and on June 20 it's World Productivity Day — a day I found myself thinking out loud about during this month's Lantern Lyceum. I'll admit I went looking for something poetic in the date. I assumed it landed near the solstice on purpose: longest day of the year, most daylight we get, a tidy little nudge to make the most of it. Turns out... no. As far as I can tell, nobody's even sure where the day came from. What is clear is what it's for: getting...
2 days ago • 1 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 14 | May 30, 2026 Hello Reader, "May" is a permission word. Not just the month — the word itself. "May I?" "You may." It's a modal verb, one of those quiet grammatical structures that signals possibility and allowance. When you say "may," you're either asking for permission or granting it. Which means we've spent an entire month named after the concept of being permitted to do something. And most of us didn't notice. We hustled through May. We planned,...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, My daughter comes home from university tomorrow... for one month. Not the whole summer. One month. And one of those weeks, I'll be away at a conference. So the math is already doing what math does. There's a stat that floats around parenting circles — the kind that lands differently once your kid is actually gone. By the time a child leaves home, the percentage of lifetime time a parent has left with them is somewhere in the single digits. Not the teens. Single digits. I've been...
9 days ago • 1 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 13 | May 23, 2026 Hello Reader, I watched Jamie Vardy's Netflix documentary last week. He's the Leicester City striker who went from non-league football and factory shifts and an ankle tag to Premier League champion. The whole arc is built around a clock running out and a man outrunning it. But it was his tattoos that stopped me. He has a sleeve — black-and-grey realism, the kind designed to look almost photographic. Pocket watches. Roses. The style...
14 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, You may have noticed things were quieter than usual from me this week. That's because I've been in it — three days of The READY Retreat with the TimeCrafting Trust community, working through the same process I've been refining for years. Reflecting, eliminating, attuning, choosing, yielding. When you step back to retreat, your usual patterns get disrupted. Intentionally. That's the point. Emails wait. The work doesn't. Now that the retreat is complete, I'm turning my attention...
15 days ago • 1 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 12 | May 16, 2026 Hello Reader, I went for a walk this week through the kind of noise that usually makes you want to find the quietest room in the house. Café sounds. Voices. The ambient hum of a city mid-afternoon. Somewhere in the middle of all that external noise, the noise inside my head started to settle. Not because the world cooperated. Because I moved through it anyway. We spend enormous energy trying to control the conditions around us. The...
21 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, You know the moment. You sat down to work. The intention was real. The task was clear. And somewhere between opening your laptop and the thing you actually needed to do, your hand moved to your phone. Not because you decided to. Just because it did. That's not a discipline problem. That's not a focus problem. That's an initiation problem — and it happens in the space before the work begins, in the half-second where habit is faster than intention. I've been saying for years that...
24 days ago • 2 min read