I’ve been thinking a lot about superpowers lately. Not the flashy kind with capes and explosions. The quieter ones. The ones you choose, often in moments when no one is watching and no one is applauding.
The ability to change yourself and your mind is one of them. It takes real strength to say, “What I believed before no longer fits,” and let that be growth instead of embarrassment.
Another is not taking things personally. Most of what people say and do has far more to do with their inner weather than with you. Learning that is like setting down a heavy bag you didn’t realize you were carrying.
Not needing to prove you’re right is a close cousin. Peace is often far more valuable than being correct, and confidence doesn’t require an audience or a verdict.
Carefully selecting your relationships is a superpower too. Who you allow close shapes how you think, how you feel, and what you tolerate. Choosing wisely is an act of self-respect.
Staying calm, especially when everything around you feels loud or urgent, is a skill that compounds over time. Calm creates clarity. Clarity creates better choices.
So is being alone without being lonely. There’s a quiet richness in enjoying your own company, in knowing you are enough without constant noise or validation.
Being okay with discomfort might be one of the most underrated powers of all. Growth rarely feels cozy. Discomfort is often just change knocking on the door.
And finally, thinking for yourself. In a world full of opinions, outrage, and borrowed beliefs, independent thought is a rare and valuable thing.
None of these powers show up on a movie poster. But practiced daily, they can quietly change your entire life.
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A Marketing Tip
The Recession-Proof Move Most Businesses Ignore
If the economy starts feeling like a funhouse mirror, here’s the marketing truth that never warps:
Your safest money isn’t “out there.” It’s already in your phone. In your inbox. In your dusty old customer list.
Most businesses panic-spend when things tighten up. More ads. More platforms. More chasing strangers who don’t know, like, or trust them yet.
Meanwhile, their best asset sits quietly in a spreadsheet, wondering why it hasn’t heard from them in years.
Let’s fix that.
Your customer list is a gold mine, not a museum
You already paid dearly to earn those customers. Ads, staff time, promotions, follow-ups, maybe even a few gray hairs. That investment is done.
Re-selling to existing or past customers costs pennies by comparison. A call. An email. A thoughtful offer. That’s it.
And here’s the key most people miss: Not all customers should hear the same message.
Talk to people like you know them (because you do)
Your best customers want to feel recognized, not marketed to.
That might look like:
Letting loyal buyers know about specials before the general public
Offering preferred pricing, priority access, or limited availability
Inviting them into subscriptions, memberships, or ongoing services that make life easier and cheaper for them
This isn’t discounting out of desperation. This is smart segmentation.
Scarcity works better when it’s sincere
If something is limited, discontinued, overstocked, or genuinely exclusive, tell your best customers first. Not with hype. With honesty.
People respond when they feel chosen. They respond faster when they feel trusted.
Education beats pressure every time
Price is always a concern. Pretending otherwise insults your customer’s intelligence.
The move is to acknowledge price, then calmly explain why it’s worth it. Quality. Craftsmanship. Longevity. Results. Savings over time.
When people understand the story behind what they’re buying, resistance drops and confidence rises.
Lead them. They’re waiting.
Here’s the part that surprises business owners most:
Satisfied customers want to buy from you again. They’re not avoiding you. They’re busy. They’re distracted. They’re waiting to be led.
Your job is to:
Remind them why they chose you
Make the offer clear
Make the next step easy
Give them a reason to act now
Do this consistently, thoughtfully, and often.
Because when the market gets shaky, the businesses that thrive aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones who remembered to knock on doors that were already open.
I finished The Coal Tattoo and knew it was one of those stories that doesn’t rush off when you’re done reading. It lingers. It sits with you.
At its core, this is a story about two sisters. Easter and Anneth are opposites. One is steady, faithful, rooted. The other is restless, expressive, always reaching for something more. One gets pregnant at a glance. The other longs to have children. They lost their parents when young and raise themselves in a coal mining town.
Their lives move in opposite directions, yet they remain tied together in a way that feels both inevitable and exhausting. If you’ve ever loved someone deeply while not fully understanding them, this story will feel familiar.
What I appreciated most is how honest their relationship is. There’s love, but it’s not polished. There’s loyalty, but it’s complicated. Silas House allows their bond to be imperfect without trying to fix it or explain it away. It feels true to how sisters actually love each other. With patience. With resentment. With forgiveness that doesn’t always arrive on time.
This is a story that treats place as a vital character. It shapes the choices, the fears, and the futures of everyone in it.
Rural Kentucky is described in vivid detail from the sweaty, grimy coal miners after a day’s work to the hard ground after winter when starting a new garden. Deep woods, long windy roads, fields of flowers, loud and raucous honky tonks where the people go to dance and socialize and find love.
Downtown Nashville with the Grand Ole Opry (Ryman’s theater) and Broadway and 2nd Street lined with bars with basement warehouses that open to the river. Sounds and smells are strong and immediate. Beer, sweat, smoke, ambition. It’s louder here, faster, less forgiving.
Where Kentucky feels rooted and enduring, Nashville feels hungry. It offers freedom, but it demands something in return. You can reinvent yourself, but you can lose yourself just as easily. The contrast between these two places mirrors the emotional divide in the story. One place holds you. The other pulls you forward.
Together, these settings don’t just frame the lives of the characters. They explain them. The land, the roads, the rooms filled with music and the quiet fields waiting for spring all press their fingerprints into who these women become. You don’t just read about where they live. You understand why leaving is so hard. And why staying can be just as painful.
This is reflective story. The kind of story that asks you to slow down and pay attention to emotional shifts instead of dramatic twists. I didn’t feel rushed to the end.
What stayed with me most was the tenderness. The understanding that family love can be both grounding and suffocating. That people grow differently even when they’re raised under the same roof. And that sometimes the deepest connections are the ones that challenge us the most.
The Coal Tattoo is quiet, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant. It doesn’t shout to be noticed. It trusts you to listen.
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From the Research Files
aka random bits of info you may or may not be able to use in your life
Most of us think lightning as one experience: crash out of a cloud and scare the dog.
Turns out, lightning has options.
Sometimes it doesn’t go down at all. Sometimes it goes up.
High above thunderstorms, in the thin air where planes stop flying and space starts to feel nearby, a strange kind of lightning shows up. Scientists call it space lightning, but its official name is much more dramatic: Transient Luminous Events. Even the atmosphere likes a flair for the theatrical.
Here’s what’s happening.
Thunderstorms build massive electrical charge. Usually, that energy discharges toward the ground. But when conditions are just right, the electricity shoots upward instead, bursting into the upper atmosphere like a secret fireworks show no one invited us to.
These flashes come in a few unforgettable varieties:
• Sprites look like glowing red jellyfish, stretching miles high above storms • Blue jets shoot upward in narrow blue cones straight from the tops of clouds • Elves appear as giant expanding rings of light, spreading out in milliseconds
They’re huge. They’re fast. And they’re gone almost as soon as they appear.
The reason they look so different from normal lightning is the air itself. Up there, the atmosphere is thin. With fewer air molecules to collide with, electricity spreads out instead of snapping sharply. The gases glow when energized, painting the sky with reds, blues, and purples like a cosmic mood ring.
What’s wild is that people saw hints of this for decades. Pilots talked about strange flashes above storms, but no one really believed them. It sounded like a trick of the eye. Once cameras finally pointed upward, the truth blinked back.
And it matters.
Space lightning connects Earth’s weather to the edge of space. It can affect radio waves, GPS signals, and the charged environment that wraps around our planet. Storms don’t stop at the cloud tops. They reach higher than we ever imagined.
So the next time lightning flashes in the distance, remember: Some of it isn’t falling at all.
Brilliant breakdown of sprites and TLEs! The comparision to glowing jellyfish is spot on, and I think that visual actually helps peple grasp just how massive these events are. I dunno if people realize pilots were seeing these for decades and getting dismissed. Sometimes the "anecdotal" stuff is just waitng for tech to catch up and prove it real.
Brilliant breakdown of sprites and TLEs! The comparision to glowing jellyfish is spot on, and I think that visual actually helps peple grasp just how massive these events are. I dunno if people realize pilots were seeing these for decades and getting dismissed. Sometimes the "anecdotal" stuff is just waitng for tech to catch up and prove it real.