If you earn $10 and then have to pay $3 to taxes, you net $7. Emotions don’t work that way. Many people think they do, which leads them to miss out some of the most interesting parts of life. Say you like a friend and they also annoy you. If you net out that you kind of like them you miss out that you have a complex relationship with them.[…] Keep reading →

“Nice guys finish last.” Alone, this thought has probably condemned many men and women to abandon being nice. Accurate or not, combined with another belief, that the alternative to being nice is to be a jerk, further condemns people to being jerks. Jerks—people with one type of poor relationship skills—even when materially successful, seem likely to face emptiness in intimacy, what many consider the most important parts of their lives.[…] Keep reading →

The more I cook from whole vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and so on, the more skeptically I look at companies that prepare food. Restaurants and packaged foods are designed to entertain your mouth, not to sustain you. If the people behind them have to sacrifice your health for their profit, they’ll do it. Increasingly I see them as seeking profit at the expense of my health, since what makes the[…] Keep reading →

A reader wrote to ask about my August 2012 post, “Three things I learned from yoga” “With yoga you can use your body alone to create many emotions and learn how to handle them.” Have you written more about this? I can only see me creating fear, determination, calmness, anger and patience. These don’t count to many, so I wonder what other emotions could one create? I haven’t done yoga[…] Keep reading →

I have friend who is very charismatic. He makes up catch phrases and says them in a way people enjoy and associate with him. One of them, which he used as a greeting, was “Word word word.” As in, you’d be at a bar and he’d show up and greet everyone with a big “Word word word!” It didn’t mean much more than he felt friendly. At least as far[…] Keep reading →

A coaching client was in tears during a call not long ago. She lives in another time zone so the call was in the evening, after work. I took the call in my home. She called from hers. I felt for her, but my job was to coach her through the situation—to enable her to make herself feel better, resolve the cause, and know how to resolve similar future situations.[…] Keep reading →

I heard yet another person saying “I don’t have time for negative people. I’m a positive person. I can’t let them bring me down.” Oh, how perfect they sound! High and mighty! He blithely and ironically didn’t notice the negative start to what he said, “I don’t have time for…” Sometimes they’ll outright say so-and-so is a negative person. People who talk about others being negative are judging others by[…] Keep reading →

Throwing things away so they’ll end up in landfills pollutes. No two ways about it. Not using something in the first place doesn’t pollute. Recycling feels like it’s roughly in the middle. If you only have two comparisons and no objective scale, how else can you compare something in the middle but roughly in the middle. Since I wanted to feel better about myself, I probably thought of recycling as[…] Keep reading →

I eat a lot of mixed nuts and peanut butter. As far as I know, they’re all healthy to someone without allergies. I eat a lot of them. I found a site that shows pictures of two hundred calories of various foods. I like and eat a lot of broccoli. Here’s two hundred calories of broccoli: Looks like an amount that would go a long way to filling me up.[…] Keep reading →