Anna Gibson

Ding. I’d been waiting on that notification. I was sitting with bated breath. Today I laugh at how ridiculous that was. Editors take a few days to a week to get back to you (if at all) but I was excited. This was the first article I’d ever pitched to any publication. The Metro Times was a famous Detroit newspaper and getting this byline under my belt was going to be huge.
I checked the notification. When I saw re: Metro Times Pitch I immediately jumped to open it. This was the editor’s respon...

Pain. That’s what I was feeling when I walked into a black-tie event in business casual clothing. I had on a bright purple shirt and black khakis. So maybe I was halfway there? Everybody was looking at me when I walked into the room. Okay. Well, I guess it was time for me to mingle
I met a woman who invited me to this event at my job. She was an acquaintance, but I wanted to try something new. She looked a little taken back at my attire, but she introduced me to her friends anyway. I was grat...

The piano was broken and I was completely focused on it. I remember my small hands grasping at it. I was turning it this way and that. I couldn’t have been more than eight. “Look at this girl!” My mother smiled into her voice. “She loves putting stuff together and taking it apart!” She leaned forward and held me tight. “My little engineer”. Little did she know, nineteen years later, I would major in software engineering.
On Finding Passion
“ Each day, you wake up thinking of the questions you...

“I just wanna be happy, don’t you want to be happy?”
-Gary Vee
I woke up at 3:30am on a Saturday. I hate waking up early-especially on my off days- but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d been coding the night before. I was working on a particularly knotty programming problem. I fell asleep, exhausted, after staring at a pale screen for four hours that evening. Finally, I had an answer to my problem and began to work on it while building the rest of my program. I looked at the clock at 3:34...

Coding Horror
I stared at the screen in utter confusion. I was taking a coding course with Udacity and I couldn’t get this problem out of my head. I was supposed to make this using code:
And I had no idea how to do it. The coding problems before this seemed so simple. Yet here I was, pondering my brains out trying to figure out a way to work it out. Then I remembered a key tenant of deliberate practice. If I couldn’t master a sticky problem, step back and look over the fundamentals before mov...

Writing tools make the writer. Without the proper environment, writing can become a tedious process. It can’t be denied that Google Docs and Microsoft Word have their place. Yet, the cluttered interface and the stark theme is harsh on both the eyes and writing process. There are no built-in outlining features and no integrations. Creating chapters in Microsoft Word becomes a chore as it isn't built for that.
I was in the same boat as a lot of writers. I was a staunch user of Google Docs with ...

N/A

Rejection is a fact of life if you’re a writer. You’ll experience all manner of rejection. Some will be useful. Some not so useful. Check out the ‘constructive criticism’ I received below on one of my articles:
So how do you deal with rejection? The Buddha had an amazing quote that I put on my desk and look at every day:
“As a solid mass of rock is not stirred by the wind,
So a sage is not moved by praise and blame.
As a deep lake is clear and undisturbed,
So a sage becomes clear upon hearing...

How to unleash the powers of vulnerability in personal branding.

A brief introduction to how to apply Machiavelli and other philosophies to business.

I was sitting in a park, watching the people. There was a homeless man named Glenn on the corner nearby. He was shaking his hat at people with a beer in one hand asking for money. No one would look at him. If they did they would glance at him with disgust. People would purposely avoid eye contact. They didn’t want to be bothered. They didn’t want to be burdened with his existence.
I was on the train and the first thing I noticed was people in their own little world. They would also avoid look...

After SCOTUS made marriage equality legal across all 50 states, conservatives, fundamentalists, and a variety of other bigots came out of the woodwork to spew hate and express their irrational viewpoints across a number of news outlets.

A large portion of the dissent could be found in the African American community, traditionally one of the most religious groups in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center:

“African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures ...

Depression and bipolar disorder was a way of life for me. When I wasn’t feeling too much, it was as if I wasn’t feeling anything, and the world around me felt grey.
Existing was a struggle, yet somehow I managed to keep a smile on my face. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t thriving, I was surviving. Soon, that began to change.
I remember the day I first read Marcus’s words. Aurelius was on the frontlines. He was a ruler and an emperor. We are all rulers of our lives and emperors of our sphere of...

According to modern chronology, in 705 BCE Nswt(pharaoh) Neferkare Shabaka- the 3rd King in a succession of Nubian rulers during the XXVth dynasty-sought to reestablish Old Kingdom traditions. Just prior to the XXVth Dynasty, KMT(Egypt) had been ravaged by the foreign rulers of the Third Intermediate Period, so this renewal of ancient Egyptian culture, philosophy and theology were sorely needed. He used various restoration projects as an opportunity to bring back the ‘golden days’ of KMT duri...