I’ve been avoiding buying food with any packaging. I started April 20. I updated my progress with pictures in “Buying no food with packaging, eighteen days and counting“. Saturday evening I bought some onions in one of those net bags. Onions make you cry. Today I’m scheduled to get a shipment of vegetables from my farm share and that comes in a box so the experiment would have ended today[…] Keep reading →

Following up yesterday’s post, “The basics: more simple and valuable than you think” about how the masters tend to focus on basics, I found a series of videos made by a great basketball player, Michael Jordan. He’s made few instructional videos. He could do things no one else could and made them look easy. He can teach anything he wants. So what does he teach? Simple basics. Things like getting[…] Keep reading →

A friend and colleague visited a couple weeks ago. He invited me to breakfast with another friend of his who happened to be an incredibly successful founder and CEO of a business related to a project of mine. You don’t expect to make such valuable connections. We made a great connection and may find ways to collaborate. I met the visiting friend in the first place through another guy I[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I compared emotions to fire and pain—things we don’t enjoy feeling but we can use to improve our lives if we know how to use them. Calling them negative leads us to suppress and deny them—the opposite of self-awareness—which takes away our ability to improve our lives. I call that counterproductive. I think sharp knives might make a more helpful analogy. I might call sharp knives negative if I[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on principles to create ideas people want to help you with and creating a helpful, supportive community around you. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view that series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] You wouldn’t believe how much access you have to people, both the number of people and how[…] Keep reading →

Yet again, another paper on empathy only associates it with emotions we don’t like—sadness, loss, etc. Almost never laughter, joy, fun, and feelings we like. I wrote about this before and how catastrophically it impedes people from developing what is otherwise an important tool for relationships, leadership, your own health, and more. I’m not even going to mention the paper because it’s so counterproductive. Wikipedia describes empathy like: discerning what[…] Keep reading →

I don’t claim to be a great cook. I don’t like unnecessary gadgets. I avoid promoting businesses for no reason. But, man, do I like my Hitachi Chime-o-matic rice cooker / vegetable steamer / miracle appliance. I call it a miracle appliance for fun because I can’t figure out how it knows when to turn off, but it does, every time. I like the kitschy name Chime-o-matic. Mostly I love[…] Keep reading →

Blaming other people is effective at solving problems if you can change other people and you can go back in time to change the past. For the rest of us, blame is effective at polarizing others against you and undermining relationships. If that’s your goal, I recommend it. It’s also effective at making you feel self-righteous and superior, until the polarization kicks in and you feel alienated or like you[…] Keep reading →

My friend, visiting from overseas, described the difficulty we all feel away from home when we can’t do the morning routine we like. Nearly everyone has a morning routine that starts their day right for them. I see a higher-level strategy: if something happens regularly, habitualize it. I love discovering things, but I don’t see any benefit in trying to discover a new ordering between showering, eating breakfast, brushing my[…] Keep reading →