My friend David Brooks, now assigned special “most hated” status for tricking me into linking to his New Yorker article by writing one interesting paragraph, makes an appearance at #25 on the Buffalo Beast’s list of The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010:

The Bernie Madoff of American letters, every tortured construct and inaccurate assumption ever set to print by this annoyingly self-described “Bourgeoisie Bohemian” is a fraudulent attempt to justify why his house is more expensive than yours. Brooks couldn’t even wait for the bodies to cool after the Haiti earthquake before writing about how useless it is to send money because those voodoo-lovin’ savages simply can’t be helped.

I look forward to this list every year.

Lane Wallace, who’s writing a book on passion, finds that it starts with a vision:

And the origins of passion, I’ve concluded, are directly linked to this idea of ‘vision.’ For passion to take hold, we first have to have a vision of an alternate future that ignites a fire within us: a vision of a wrong righted, a community developed, a great new product made and sold, a goal achieved, or just a new relationship full of happiness and bliss. Not every vision leads to a passionate pursuit of it, of course. But in all cases where people do pursue something with passion, it’s because there was a vision, first, that sparked an unquenchable flame and desire to make that vision real.

It’s easy for me to be cynical when people start talking about vision, but I’ve never seen a team (or a person) succeed at anything difficult without one. The responsible business person in me would add that once you have a vision and you’ve decided to work toward it, you need to set measurable long term and short term goals to make progress toward that vision.

Since Valentine’s Day is approaching, I thought I’d remind people of my 2007 post, Romantic gift giving for pragmatic people.