Would you feel weird to eat the peel of an orange? I don’t know about you, but I would have thought people would consider me weird to peel an orange and then eat any of the peel. It turns out the peel has most of the fruit’s vitamin C, nearly all of its fiber, a decent amount of calcium, and almost no calories. It’s healthy and comes free with the[…] Keep reading →

You’re born liking fruit. Even if you liked candy more than fruit as a kid like I did, you still like it. If someone gives you a mango, you’d rather eat it than not. You aren’t born liking vegetables. At least I wasn’t. Until adulthood, if someone gave me a cauliflower, I’d rather not eat it, no matter how healthy they told me it was. The problem is that you[…] Keep reading →

A student in the online entrepreneurship course I’m creating asked about distractions. When he wants to work, he often gets distracted. I think me answer will help others so I’m sharing it here. Most life-long valuable things have long-term, non-urgent reward. Things that have immediate reward or urgency will distract. For example, if you want to do well at school, the reward for working on a project may come days[…] Keep reading →

If you want to learn, find an experience to teach you and make it happen, not just the answers written out. Let the experience create the answer for you. When I wanted to learn something, I used to get a book and read about it. We learn more through experience. I teach that way. I also realize I’ve adopted the habit of trying to do things to learn. If I[…] Keep reading →

What do you need? Typically responses include food, shelter, love, relationships, vacations, etc. I’ve written before on the social repulsiveness of neediness (“You need to read this post” and “The risks of saying “I need…”“, for example). Let’s consider the personal perspective. What perspectives on things can you change from feeling you need them into enjoying them? What relationships do you feel you need but you could instead simply enjoy?[…] Keep reading →

The other day I had to do something hard. I forget what it was. You know the feeling when you don’t want to do something. You find ways to avoid it. Then I asked myself, “Is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” It wasn’t close. Then it didn’t seem so hard, so I did it and it was easy enough that I don’t remember it anymore, only the question[…] Keep reading →

I think you’ll like what I wrote about food to someone who wrote: I’ve been looking for something like this [to learn to cook, in balance with my work] in my life, but what’s a good place to start learning how to cook? I’m a young single dude in his 20s, and the most I can do is boil some pasta. I work from home so time is not really[…] Keep reading →

A reader wrote about a successful use of a technique I wrote about in “Someone not returning your emails? Here’s a polite tactic that gets responses.” I thought I’d share for others, since we all face the challenge sometimes. Also because I find over and over that low-level instruction, even or rather especially on low-level details leads to high-level success. Schools don’t teach these details but they matter. Hey Joshua,[…] Keep reading →

I hope long time readers are asking, “What?!” Five years ago, in my fifth post on this blog, I wrote “Less, please,” which founded one of my most fundamental practices, one I recommend to everyone. That post described reducing my wall of books to about ten, learning about my values and discovering freedom where I used to feel weighed down. I’ve since gotten rid of more books and more other[…] Keep reading →