Last week on Twitter and Facebook we asked our friends: What is the next thing you want to learn? We pose a question to our Twitter and Facebook faithfuls once a day, so if you’re not yet a @GOOD follower or fan, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation. Here’s a sampling…
Last week on Twitter and Facebook we asked our friends: What is the next thing you want to learn?
We pose a question to our Twitter and Facebook faithfuls once a day, so if you’re not yet a @GOOD follower or fan, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.
Here’s a sampling of responses from our Twitter:
And here is what our Facebook buddies had to say:
Want us to ask the GOOD community something? Tweet or Facebook your question to us.
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“Luckily, I caught him first try.”
A teenager is being praised for pulling off a heroic act straight out of an American western film. The boy saved a man from drowning by lassoing him like a cowboy.
Fourteen-year-old Jory Thomas was just visiting with his grandparents on their campground near Yellowstone River. Jory had his lariat to practice the roping skills he’d been learning for the past year. That’s when he heard cries for help from the nearby river.
“We all heard, ‘Help, help,’” Jory said to KTVQ News. “There’s two or three people floating down the river, one hanging on to the cooler, and he wasn’t saying anything.”
A raft carrying four people crashed into a bridge pillar, knocking them all into the Yellowstone River. While three of them made it to shore, the fourth was drifting quickly downstream as he clung to a cooler. Jory emptied his pockets and grabbed his lariat, immediately rushing to help.
“This current was pretty fast then, and he was moving pretty quickly,” said Jory. “Only thing I could focus on was helping him get out of the water because I didn’t want to see anyone go in front of me.”
Jory had been practicing using a lariat to rope a dummy on his parents’ ranch nearly every afternoon when the weather was fair. Ready for action, Jory ran into the shallower part of the river, getting chest-deep into the water. Letting his training do the work, Jory took his 12-foot lariat and lassoed the drowning man.
“Luckily, I caught him first try,” he said.
Jory slowly pulled the man to shore as first responders arrived.
“I felt pretty good afterwards that I knew he was okay and was out of the water,” he said. “God was basically putting me in the place of all this. God was just telling me all of this at the time and saying, ‘Go get him, you got it, and I believe in you.’”
Jory’s family was proud but not too surprised that he leapt into action. To them, being helpful was just Jory being Jory.
“His first instinct always is to help other people. He’s always been that way,” said Sandy, Thomas’ grandmother. “The whole community is proud of him. We’ve had a lot of feedback, but that’s Jory. He’s always there to help somebody else.”
“We’ll be in town at the grocery store, and you’ll see an elderly person,” Jase, Jory’s father, told Cowboy State Daily. “They can’t pack the groceries, and he never says a word. He goes over and gets their groceries and packs them out. That’s just who he is.”
The local police also praised Jory for taking action.
“My opinion, Jory saved the individual’s life, 100%,” said Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg. “Had Jory not acted, I believe the chances of this individual making it to shore were very slim.”’
“Jory saw another in trouble and acted, not for himself but for another,” Ronneberg added. “Jory is a lesson for all of us in this day and age and showed us what is courageous and right.”
Human waste is helping grow lush greenery.
The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority—now known as D.C. Water—has long provided water and sewer services to Washington, D.C. But for the past decade, the utility has also had an unexpected side hustle: turning human wastewater into fertilizer with flourishing results.
At most wastewater treatment plants, flushed water is cleaned, while the remaining solid matter is hauled away for disposal. Over time, transporting and disposing of that waste can cost millions of dollars while increasing carbon emissions from the trucks carrying it. A decade ago, however, D.C. Water decided to invest in transforming the solid waste into “humanure” rather than throwing it away.
At the end of the wastewater treatment process, the collected human waste solids are processed into biosolid fertilizer using technology developed by Norwegian company Cambi. The process doesn’t just produce high-quality fertilizer—it also generates biogas that can be put to good use.
“So you get up to 40% more biogas,” Cambi CEO Eirik Fadnes said. “That biogas can be used to generate electricity to be used elsewhere in the wastewater-treatment plant or put on the grid and sold.”
D.C. Water sells the biosolid fertilizer under the brand name Bloom, and it’s already proving to be a success. Bloom has been used throughout the Washington, D.C., area by customers including Catholic University, Mount Olivet Cemetery, and the Franciscan Monastery. It’s also used on numerous lawns, school grounds, community gardens, and golf courses.
The numbers underscore D.C. Water’s success. To date, nearly 400,000 tons of Bloom have been sold across Washington, D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, generating $13.6 million in revenue. D.C. Water originally estimated it would take 20 years for Bloom to pay off its investment. But thanks to strong demand from institutions, landscapers, and local garden centers, the utility is now on pace to recoup that investment in just 12 years.
Bloom is also helping D.C. Water meet its environmental goals. By turning waste into a useful product instead of hauling it away for disposal, the utility has reduced its carbon footprint by roughly 50,000 metric tons of CO₂ emissions each year—the equivalent of taking more than 11,700 gas-powered cars off the road annually. The process also produces biogas, which can be converted into electricity to help offset the energy costs of wastewater treatment.
None of this would matter if human biosolids weren’t effective at improving soil. “Humanure,” a term coined by Joseph Jenkins, refers to compost made from properly treated human waste. Because human feces can contain disease-causing pathogens, it must be handled carefully. After all, we call it “waste” for a reason.
When human waste is composted correctly, naturally occurring microbes break down the organic material while generating enough heat to destroy harmful pathogens. Over time, the result is a nutrient-rich compost that can improve soil health. Some farmers even build specialized outdoor composting toilets to create humanure for use on their land.
Should D.C. Water continue on this path of simultaneous profitability and environmental improvement, it’s likely other wastewater treatment plants will follow its lead.
“Lazy” people are thinking people.
Many folks feel pressured to be more productive or believe they should always be doing more. After all, no one wants to be perceived as lazy. However, a decades-old quote that celebrates the value of being “lazy,” along with a recent scientific study, suggests that doing less might actually be the smarter move.
During 1947 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Clarence Bleicher, a Chrysler executive and president of the company’s DeSoto division, offered an unexpected perspective on “lazy” workers:
“I have taught my foremen this for some months now—if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after ten days he will have an easy way to do it, and you perfect that way and you will have it in pretty good shape.”
Over time, the quote was shortened to: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult (or hard) job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” For decades, the saying was misattributed to several prominent figures, including billionaire Bill Gates.
Regardless of the quote’s origin, its central idea received scientific support in a 2026 study. Led by psychologist Nathalie André at the University of Poitiers, the neuroscience researchers found that people and animals behave according to the “principle of least effort.” In other words, what we often call “laziness” may simply reflect a natural tendency to seek the easiest path to a reward while avoiding unnecessary effort or punishment.
While they may appear inactive, their brains are constantly weighing whether the effort is worth the reward. That cost isn’t limited to physical exertion. It can also include the time required, mental fatigue, frustration, or anxiety a task may bring.
The researchers found that “lazy” people aren’t opposed to challenges. Instead, they’re selective about how they invest their mental and physical energy. That may explain why a student is labeled a “slacker” by a math teacher but “studious” by an advanced English professor. The brain naturally gravitates toward tasks that feel the most rewarding while also trying to accomplish them with the least amount of effort needed to succeed.
While being hardworking is admirable, a 2016 study by psychologist Todd McElroy supports the findings of the newer research. McElroy found that people with a greater need for cognition tended to devote more energy to mentally solving problems than to physical action. In other words, the people often labeled “lazy” weren’t avoiding effort—they were simply directing their energy differently.
He also found that both cognitive and physical problem solvers performed better when they got more sleep. The point is that if your body is telling you to take an afternoon nap, it may not be laziness motivating you. Instead, it could be your body’s way of restoring the mental and physical reserves needed to be more innovative and efficient afterward.
So if you’re focused on a problem or task yet aren’t physically doing anything, know that your “laziness” may simply be your brain searching for the most efficient use of your effort. Who knows? You may stumble upon a solution that’s more efficient than the one everyone else eventually adopts.
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