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Doctors tell us that we should exercise moderately for about thirty minutes a day.  Pretty standard health advice.  The only thing, our mind is actually the asset that must be worked on most and understood best. But there doesn’t seem to be a minimum daily requirement for mental exertion.  And there should be. Especially when it comes to noticing and managing our more damaging thoughts.  Emmett’s daily devotional was among the…

Manhattan pizza is not good because it doesn’t have to be.  There are eight million angry, hungry, sweaty people in this city, and the majority of them are running late to something.  Pizza is convenient, tasty, cheap and full of energy. And so, from an economics perspective, the shops have no real incentive to make amazing food. Because their demand is inelastic. Their audience is built in.  Why would…

The startup landscape is littered with the carcasses of young, enthusiastic, creative entrepreneurs, buried beneath the ashes of brave ideas, failed dreams and misguided expectations.  My question is, when did we decide that was a bad thing?  At least those people took a risk. At least they had the guts to follow their dream, put it all on the line, live on an unpaved road and hope to find…

Camille reminds us in her book about envy that the ego is a fragile little demon that gorges itself on our eternal discontent. It sulks like a toddler when it doesn’t get its way.  Personally, that sounds exactly like most of the battles inside my head. Tell me if this sounds familiar.  Your ego cunningly tricks you into believing that happiness can be found in some other way. At some magical…

Nobody has complete integrity all of the time.  Life is messy, complicated and unpredictable. No matter how honorable and authentic we purport to be, the reality is, everyone does what they have to do to survive and be happy.  We all work out our own brand of compromise. We all find compartments to put things in that make them okay.  Sometimes we even sell our soul if times are…

Being picky isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom.  The problem is, we have expectations. The problem is, we are afraid of taking risks, being wrong, looking foolish and getting hurt. The problem is, we are addicted to the identity of a person of heroic integrity who holds impossibly high standards for themselves and others. The problem is, we romanticize the fairytale of finding the ideal partner or the perfect…

People love bragging to themselves and others about how they’re really doing the work.  It just sounds so ambitious and blue collar and honest. Doing the work.  The only problem with that phrase is, it presupposes that people have a productive definition of what work is.  Because if their initial assumption is flawed, then any subsequent ambition is wasted.  Like the person who has been unemployed for two years, but…

Rodriguez’s memoir about the twenty something kid who became a major player in the film world reminds young artists of something important: No matter how many people you drag in with you to create that safety in numbers feeling you’re going for, at some it’s going to be all up to you, and you need to be prepared for that.  And not that teamwork and collaboration aren’t important and necessary for doing…

Anytime we believe that we are broken, sinful and full of mistakes, we are operating from a core belief of unworthiness.  And it’s simply not true. Because contrary to popular conditioning, we are not broken, and we do not need fixing. There is nothing wrong with us because there is nothing wrong. Wrongness and rightness, goodness and badness, these are all stories other people have sold to us.  And…

Most of us are highly impatient and don’t trust the natural rhythm of change.  And so, we sometimes attempt to change too many things at once. Because that seems faster more efficient.  Unfortunately, that amount of change can overwhelm us and backfire. Which leads to frustration, which leads to beating ourselves up for falling short, which leaves us worse than when we started off.  It’s like the passionate but…