[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] How to use willpower summarizes the previous posts. Use willpower either for brief, self-contained projects that you’ll finish before running out of mental energy to sustain it[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday’s discussion of when not to use willpower — when you aren’t aware of where you are emotionally or where you want to or when you risk[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] If all you could do was act on whatever emotion was most dominant at any time, you would be purely reactive. You would not be able to[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Understanding willpower requires understanding emotions functionally, so let’s start there. A functional perspective isn’t the only way to view emotions — exploring and communicating how they feel[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] I’ll be starting what I expect to be a four or five part series on willpower. The series should give an understanding of what willpower is and[…] Keep reading →

Here are some pictures of the Parsons students working on the linear zoetropes and their results. Now that I can make slide shows, I have to split the images by dimensions, so there are two slide shows.

Following yesterday’s primer on flow, here are two simple ideas to bring more flow. If you’ve read only Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s book, they may be new. The Wikipedia page on flow but not Csikszentmihalyi’s book covers the first. The second is new, as far as I know, though small. Recall the ten conditions of the flow state (from Wikipedia, citing Csikszentmihalyi articles): Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals[…] Keep reading →