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Imagine you’re running late for an important meeting. On the way to the office, you start getting sweaty, hurried and anxious. Sitting in traffic, helpless as a leaf in a gale, you cycle through the excuse barrage in your mind. How will you justify being late so your coworkers aren’t pissed and your client doesn’t fire you? Maybe tell them there was a traffic accident. Say you jumped out…

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. And as the decision time increases, the user experience suffers. This law was first uncovered in the fifties, and since then has become a key tenet of effective web design. Ask any of the programmers you know. Nobody wants to paralyze and frustrate their user. Kill all the pointless features and just give…

The cashier bagging my groceries accidentally dropped a few of my avocados on the floor. No problem. Happens to everybody. They’re just going to be mashed into guacamole in twenty minutes anyway, right? But in that moment, here’s how the woman responded. First, she slammed her face into her hands and started berating herself for being an idiot. Next, she yelled out for one of her coworkers to come…

The emotional and psychological burden of having to think about certain things can be very high. Which doesn’t mean those things are not worth thinking about at all, but we do our nervous system a disservice when we psychologically tie ourselves to more things than are necessary. Isn’t life already burdensome enough? Why not free ourselves from these albatrosses that keep flying after us everywhere we go? Here, let…

Blood simple is when criminals lose control of full rationality at the moment of committing the crime and inevitably leave incriminating clues behind. As a result, the consequences of their acts quickly swirl out of control, and everything goes to hell. Coens made their debut movie about this phenomenon in the eighties. It makes for a compelling plot line. But what’s interesting about the film is, you don’t have…

People pleasing is a learned behavior. Most of us were trained from a very young age, by parents, teachers, coaches and other authority figures, to either meet people’s expectations, or follow our own essential desires and suffer the consequences. This behavior served us well when we were children. It kept us safe and helped us grow. However, as adults, the disease to please can have the opposite effect. Think…

Here is a short quiz to gauge what your relationship with temptation is. *Do you have trouble stopping something once you’ve started? *Is it easier for you to give something up altogether than to indulge moderately? *Do you feel peace and gratitude at the thought of never having to get or do something? *Do you loathe spending your precious energy justifying why you should go ahead and indulge? If…

Siri, the virtual assistant that answers questions, makes recommendations, and performs internet enabled actions, knows how to read your mind. If you tell her you have a headache, she’ll respond by saying that she’s found three drugstores not far from you, where you can buy aspirin. Actually, my favorite conspiracy theory claims the assistant will intentionally select drug stores that are a few miles down the road, knowing that…

My former coworker was telling me about his biggest irrational fear. He said that he always had terrible anxiety about not remembering people’s names. Whether he was the new student at school, the new player on a sports team, or the new employee at the company, his fear of offending others by not getting their names right struck deep. Fortunately, he told me, on his first day of work…

After spending a year writing and performing my latest batch of songs, my wife and I spent two weeks in the Utah desert in the literal old west, filming black and white footage to bring my dark and angry sentiments to life. My forthcoming movie has no characters, no plot, no script, no sound, and no narrative arcs. Just music, words, and landscape. Full film below, and soundtrack available…