I wrote the following to a client and thought it was worth sharing here. I’ve written similar things before, but it bears repeating. I think it speaks for itself, but let me know if it needs more explanation or context. —————————– I find with passions you get out what you put in, so I think the advice to find your passion only gets half of it. You need to find[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written before about why deciding is hard. One of my most helpful (to me) insights was that the difficulty in deciding is not figuring out which option I like, but working up the nerve to get rid of the options I don’t choose. Our language illustrates this challenge — the -cide in decide is the same -cide as in pesticide, insecticide, etc. It means to kill, reiterating that the[…] Keep reading →

Exercise helps everything. I can’t think of any time or situation exercise doesn’t help. Whenever I’m not sure what to do, I think, “exercise can’t hurt.” Even if all I do is a burpee or two, I find it clarifies my thoughts. I’ve never found a case where exercise worsened a situation. Even if I’m in an insane hurry, where I feel every second counts, a push-up or two barely[…] Keep reading →

Illustrative labels can help, as opposed to evaluative, judgmental ones like yesterday’s post. I love the term “Monkey Mind.” I heard it from a friend who teaches yoga. Without hearing any explanation I immediately understood its meaning and saw how the term helped understand a concept. When you increase your self-awareness you start to notice how your mind works. The less you know how to manage it, the more it[…] Keep reading →

The other day I saw a post for a headline that caught my eye “On Scale of 0 to 500, Beijing’s Air Quality Tops ‘Crazy Bad’ at 755” because I was just in Beijing. I remember early one evening looking up in the sky and seeing a low flying airplane. Actually, I only saw its lights in the smog. I got confused looking at it because it looked close, so[…] Keep reading →

Learning Chinese as I am, I’m learning a lot of rules of that language. If you’ve spoken to me in person over the past few years, you’ve probably heard my fun-with-language game to purposefully conjugate the verbs to be and to have wrong. I often say “How is you?” or “I has to go to the store.” I’ll be the first to admit the mis-conjugation is affected, but it’s also[…] Keep reading →

Richard Feynman, one of my heroes, Nobel prize in physics winner, and entertaining guy, had concise advice in his commencement address to Caltech relevant to yesterday’s post on not fooling yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. Here’s the text of the full speech, which is famous in scientific circles for his concept of “cargo cult science“,[…] Keep reading →