I had a call this morning with someone who is launching a new idea and was seeking advice on how to get it off the ground. In her words, “I’m so passionate about this one issue, but I have no idea how to solve the whole thing when I’m starting so small.” Here was my advice to get an idea off the ground :1- Publicly set a bold but attainable goal.

Last month, I noticed a few people on my Facebook feed sharing a link to a Reddit post that announced the launch of something called the Pineapple Fund. The person behind it wrote that they’d been an early investor in Bitcoin and felt as though at a certain point, enough money is enough, and he or she now wanted to donate $86M in Bitcoin to charities.

When my friend Dan Teicher sent me the music video above, it did just that. For years he's been telling me about his desire to craft a music video using the years of footage he has of his grandparents' life together.

It's not every day that you have the opportunity to meet one of your real life heroes. Not a mainstream celebrity, but someone who you've watched and admired from a distance thinking, "Am I the only one who is so transfixed by this individual?"

Every so often you come across a clip that's just so insane you have to share it. This crew of "urban skiers" prove that you can pursue your passion in any environment. Using wooden crates, cinder blocks and snow, they create ramps out of abandoned buildings, rooftops and anything else you can imagine.This clip is well worth all 10 minutes.

Sometimes you see news headlines proclaiming miracles that seem too extraordinary to believe. “Man reunited with lost love fifty years later,” or “Child falls thirty floors and only suffers a broken leg,” they read. I’ve always questioned the truth of these tall tales, but for the first time in my life I read one of those headlines last night and when I clicked to watch the local news story, I saw a member of my own family being profiled.

Over many years, I’ve developed a series of systems and shortcuts to manage my life. For the first time, I’m going to write them all out and share not just what I use, but how I use them. A few simple tweaks to each secret system allows me to address emails, remember tasks,

Seven weeks ago, on the greatest night of my entire life, I asked the woman I love with every ounce of my being to marry me. The night took months of preparation, and in a moment of absolute perfection, she said “Yes."The next morning the gravity of it all began to hit me, and I just couldn’t stop smiling.

Three years ago today, I wrote the scariest email of my life. It began, “To my Bain family, it’s been real. It’s been great. It’s been really great.” I was saying farewell.When I pressed “Send”, the four paragraph email was delivered to more than 400 employees across the Bain & Company system- The entire NYC office, international partners, managers, mentors and friends.

This past weekend I was in Florida and got to spend the entire weekend with my 83-year old grandmother, Ma. She doesn’t tell people this often, but she was born in Hungary and forced into Auschwitz at the age of 14. In many ways she was my motivation for starting Pencils of Promise, as I found myself living a life of self-absorption in late 2008 and decided to change my ways by focusing on honoring her through the creation of our first school.

In one hour it will be 12:01 am on October 31st, 2012, and it’ll be my 29th birthday. My apartment has no power, no access to internet, and my cell phone has no service. Hurricane Sandy has attacked NYC and the northeast coastlines, and for the past two days normal life has been put on hold.

My 29th birthday ask, help me build a school!This year I’m returning to where PoP started, with a birthday request to help build a school.

Have you ever had someone directly criticize you in public? It’s humiliating right? Earlier this month I hopped on a flight to give a talk at a college that chose The Promise of a Pencil as the common read for all their students.

Anytime you publish a book, there are many rounds of drafts, iterations and edits. If your book is put out by a major house, as I experienced with Simon & Schuster, you have several “passes” at the manuscript until there comes the daunting day when they essentially say, “Once you email your approval, there can be no more changes, the book will go to the printers and into the world.”

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how much competition drives people. Would you describe yourself as personally competitive? How are you viewing competition?

In today’s culture, the phrase “influencer” is thrown around quite frequently. It usually describes an individual who has an outsized impact on the lives of others. These people are often quantified through the size of their followings on social media or the depth of engagement we see when they share a new piece of content.

Three weeks ago I went to the underground Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village with my fiancé for a Friday night of laughs. It was the week that The Promise of a Pencil launched, so I figured there’s no better way to take the edge off than with my lady and some laughter.

Yesterday I found out that The Promise of a Pencil will be spending its second week on the New York Times Bestseller list. It debuted at #2 last week and within five days completely sold out all of Amazon and BN.com’s stock nationwide.This week it’s at #8, joining a list of authors in the Top 10 that includes Arianna Huffington, President Jimmy Carter, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill O’Reilly, Chelsea Handler and Sheryl Sandberg.