Everybody wants to be a star, but I know a guy who is already a black hole.

His stories draw you in like you would not believe, and he has enough of them to fill more books than I can read.

That’s assuming I can read, but believe me, I’m totally hooked on phonics.

So this guy (let’s call him Kameron) was chatting with me, when I abruptly interrupted him as soon as he mentioned his family. I know I can be impulsively insensitive at times, but even I was shocked with what came out.

I said, “It’s funny, I’ve never really thought of you as having a family … I kind of figured you just, you know, existed.”

On the surface, Kameron is just an older student at Marquette, getting a second degree or something. I never understood or asked about the big picture of how he got here, but I think not knowing adds to the experience of being friends with him.

I guess he’s like one of those characters whose backgrounds you don’t question because you’ve somehow assumed they’ve always been around – like Kramer from Seinfeld, or the Cookie Monster.

And quite frankly, I question how Kameron is still around after some of the stuff he’s told me. He’s like some Siamese cat that has way more than nine lives … probably two baker’s dozens worth.

Forgive me for evading, but the content of his stories are nonessential, so ask me some other time. What I’m really getting at is more important: how he gets all his stories.

He lives by an admirable, open-mindedness principle that I’m going to call “Saying ‘yes’ to the next 25 minutes.”

Don’t misunderstand; this is not like what Jim Carrey does in that one movie. If I remember correctly, Kameron likes Monster, not Red Bull.

And it’s not about saying yes to everything, because that’s absurd. Be reasonable, and responsible.

The principle tells you to say yes whenever you can imagine second guessing yourself.

“Saying yes to 25 minutes”  is a way to open doors to hours of possibilities. Meeting people, learning new things, discovering something or maybe embarrassing yourself: Who knows? The only certainty is uncertainty … unless you say no.

Honestly, not much can go wrong in 25 minutes anyway. You’re not permanently committed to any situation if it doesn’t end up how you thought it would be.

Again, it’s only 25 minutes. That’s not even a half hour, or so I’m told.

And let’s face it, campus all-stars, what you’re doing isn’t always the most exciting thing in the world anyway. We can’t always be launching water balloons at people coming back from Dayglow.

The 25-minute principle isn’t even hard to incorporate. It’s because it’s an attitude, I think. Maybe it’s just an optimism thing.

I’m still new to it myself. I finally started to try it out this summer, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet. I say that because the majority of the time I think I’m saying yes to something new, I just end up at Potawatomi.

Still, I’m actually in the black over there, so for now this principle is working out, even if it’s not working properly, per se.

I’m not instructing you to do something new, really. I guess I’d rather just make a point of telling you that I tried a new perspective, it’s not too far-fetched, and it’s produced some interesting results.

For Kameron, it’s a lifestyle. For me, it might just be a phase that will fizzle out soon enough.

I mean, some things do merely come and go with the seasons – like our the cult of The North Face jacket, which I caught an early sighting of last week.

Anyway, whether your morning, day or night looks bleak or bright, at least think about saying yes to the first 25 minutes of an opportunity. Maybe you will right now. After all, the sooner you find yourself telling one great story, the sooner you’ll be in the middle of another.