My friend Laura Stack (”The Productivity Pro”) has a new book coming out this week called The Exhaustion Cure: Up Your Energy from Low to Go in 21 Days! It’s packed with ideas and worth checking out if your want to get more done and feel better doing it. Click the link (or image) to buy the book at Amazon.com and email your receipt to Katie@TheProductivityPro.com. You’ll get a return email with the link for the extras included in Laura’s promotion.

Today a well-known baseball player under scrutiny for alleged steroid use (which he denies in the face of some substantial evidence) also denied beginning an affair with a well-know country western star when she was only 15 (which she did not confirm but rather said she could not deny). Said athlete admitted that he had flaws and apologized to his family after denying the accusations for doing some things that “were not right.”

Make a note of “not right.” I think that is spin for “wrong.” But gosh, wrong makes one sound so…guilty.

I am blessed. I awoke this morning in my home, healthy and with food and water.

22,000+ victims of the cyclone in Myanmar did not wake up today. Tens of thousands more did wake up wondering if they could find food and water and perhaps contemplating if they’d ever have a home again.

To say that we take life for granted is an old refrain, but not only less true in the retelling. Tragedy is a wake-up call C.S. Lewis called pain God’s megaphone. Job struggled with why bad things happen to good people.

I just pulled a quote from John Eldredge’s new book Walking with God that says “Don’t waste your pain.” While we never seek nor welcome pain, we can at the very least learn from it.

The appropriate response to the pain of others is empathy and assistance. But we can even learn from their pain, or at least be reminded of lessons forgotten.

And one of those lessons is about the joy of waking up.

As I appreciate my blessings today, my prayers and thoughts are with those affected in Myanmar and for people everywhere who are hurting.

Aristotle believed in the golden mean, the midway point between too little and too much of anything.

Just as wordiness is too much, sometimes brevity can be too little. If you find yourself defending your brief communications, the clue phone is ringing for you.

Recently a friend was justifiably incensed by something he read online. It was a one-sentence condemnation of an organization to which we both belong. When my friend confronted the author, he received a long explanation about what the author really meant. The problem was that meaning could not have logically been extracted from the original three word sentence.

Michelle Obama learned first-hand the dangers of brevity when she commented that she was finally proud of America (my paraphrase). When challenged she explained that she had been proud before, but that she was prouder now…etc. Think of the damage she could have avoided had she added a few words to her original comment.

The lesson? Beware the dangers of brevity. If a message is important, explain it. Concise communication is easier to misinterpret than wordy communication. If you can’t hit the golden mean, aim for communicating a little too much rather than a little too little.