Crunch time means you don’t have a lot of time, you have a lot to do, mistakes can cost a lot, people depend on you, and likely you depend on other people. People make mistakes. Also, sometimes you have to make decisions based on less information than you’d like. If people dwell on the mistakes or find out later that someone else could have made a better decision, they point[…] Keep reading →

How many times do we have to learn? Giving advice someone hasn’t asked for backfires. For that matter, giving advice to someone who asked for it tends to backfire. Why? Because when we give advice we imply we know the other person’s life better than they do. We appear to impose our values on them. We likely neglect that the other person is already doing something to improve their lives.[…] Keep reading →

Sometimes you recognize something you learned as a great life lesson. Sometimes what you thought was a great life lesson turns out not to be. How can you tell them apart? I’ve found that the more meaningful a life lesson, the more trivial it sounds when you explain it to someone else. For example, I went to North Korea and saw people living under different conditions than anyplace else, yet[…] Keep reading →

I learned something profoundly helpful watching a friend perform music on stage. You might find it obvious, but it helped me. The moment a musician makes a mistake while performing, it’s in the past. You can’t change it. The best thing you can do for a great performance is to keep playing regardless of what happened. That doesn’t mean you believe it never happened, but changing something now, like stopping[…] Keep reading →

This isn’t a diet or fitness blog, but your body is a major part of you. I don’t see how you can live the life you want without achieving the body you want. Conversely, if you don’t have the body you want, I suggest you aren’t living according to your values: your body tells you what to change to create the lifestyle you want. This post is about emotions like[…] Keep reading →

Here’s an old story that comes in many versions (here are seven), but I learned from Srikumar Rao‘s book Are You Ready to Succeed (text from this blog). An old man lived in a valley with his son, a handsome and dutiful youth. They lived a peaceful life despite a lack of material possessions. They were very happy. So much so, that neighbors began to get envious. One day, the[…] Keep reading →

I expect to log into Facebook once more — to message my connections there that they won’t be able to find me there, why, and where to find me instead — then I’ll leave for good. Why leave? I knew I wanted to leave after Facebook made its privacy policy too intrusive for my tastes. I felt they had too much control over my personal data. Facebook is creepy, getting[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written about raising your awareness of your mental chatter (aka self-talk, internal monologue, voice of judgment, etc) and learning to voice it. I call both of those activities passive. You can also work actively with your mental chatter. Passive awareness and voicing of your mental chatter helps. In my experience going from unawareness to passive awareness improved my understanding of how my mind worked as much as anything. The[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I wrote on what power is. Today let’s look at status, again because I find the more precisely you understand a concept, the better you can use it. Status is important. Nearly everybody wants to have a higher status. Nobody wants to have the lowest status. So what is status? I came across this definition that works well for me. It doesn’t work as well as yesterday’s definition of[…] Keep reading →