dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about stories, storytelling... and my mother.

“People change. Circumstances change. Legal documents don’t change.” — Brent Beshore, CEO of AdVentures At my first job out of college, I was told that I would get health care. Dental, medical — the usual. This sounded good to me, even though I didn’t know what a co-pay was, or a deductible, or anything else (…)

There was a point not all that long ago when I was pretty sure I could codify entrepreneurship. I’d heard plenty of stories, and talked to plenty of entrepreneurs, and I was seeing a lot of the same themes repeat. I thought that if I could just ID specific points along the way, I could (…)

Forbes ran a story on their website this week about Best Buy. The lead paragraph read: “Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.” Then it went on to detail numerous problems with (…)

In 2002, the company that measures how many people watch television decided to do something experimental: They started measuring how many viewers were watching TV shows via something called TiVo, a personal recording device that had come to market three years earlier. Nielsen Media Research, the ratings company, had been measuring TV ratings since the (…)

I spent the weekend at NewsFoo, this unconference out in Phoenix. It’s a strange affair: The organizers — O’Reilly Media, the Knight Foundation and Google — handpick about 150 people involved in all corners of news, and they throw them in a building together for a weekend. There aren’t any sessions planned out in advance. (…)

I am 24 years old, and I’m going through a period of transition in my life. It’s that time of the year when I start getting all thoughtful about where I am and where I’m going, and at this very moment, I’m stuck in Kansas City Int’l, waiting for a flight home. So I wanted (…)

My startup songwriter-in-residence, Todd Snider, has a line that I find myself quoting a lot. It’s from a brilliant little song, titled “Easy Money.” He sings: Everyone wants the most they can possibly get For the least they can possibly do And he couldn’t be more spot on. I meet a lot of people who (…)

Every once in a while, I get to meet someone who just knocks me over. Someone doing something inspiring and risky and ambitious and epic. Someone who’s doing something incredible. And last night, I met three ladies who are traveling America in an RV, doing good deeds and inspiring others to chase big dreams. I (…)

Up front, I should say: I am not a great networker. Not yet. This goes back a long way, but the short version is: Sometime around the 6th grade, I realized that I was terrifyingly shy. Calling a friend to ask, “Hey, you wanna play basketball up at school?” was a Herculean ordeal. I remember (…)

I went out to dinner last night with this girl. She was about my age. From upstate New York. We met via kickball, and I asked her out. Nothing too formal. Kickball romances typically aren’t, I’m told. But we were on this patio, and it was a nice night, and she had gone through the (…)