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Watching our dreams become realities is one of life’s most fulfilling experiences.  Most people, after all, only get to dream their dreams. Few people actually get to live them.  But if we’re one of the lucky ones, something we have to watch out for is speed. Because if the wish fulfillment process happens quicker and earlier than initially anticipated, and if we manage to satisfy so many of our dreams that we become…

When my wife and I relocated to a new city and didn’t know a soul, we were deeply intentional about our social capital.  We made finding friends a priority. We maximized our opportunities to meet kindred spirits. And we actively built multiple centers of belonging so that we wouldn’t feel isolated and disconnected.  In fact, before moving, I even designed business cards for us. As a couple. As a…

How we perceive and interpret our success is more important than how much success we actually have.  It’s all a matter of perspective.  On one hand, if we define our success on other people’s terms, beating ourselves up because we haven’t won the trophy running their race, then we’re going get ensnared in the infinite regression of comparison and resentment.  Which, scientifically speaking, sucks.  It’s like drinking the poison…

The worst thing about a computer freezing is, you can’t google how to fix a frozen computer.  It’s like a modern day ouroboros. A digital snake trying to eat its own tail.  And so, the only solution, is to take your laptop the shop and hand it over to a real person and trust that they can fix it.  What’s fascinating is, the human brain works the same way. …

No matter how prolific we are, there isn’t an artist alive whose astonishing fertility of creative genius can’t be exhausted.  It’s part and parcel of the process. Nobody can spend their entire career living in harvest season. Eventually, the land has to dry up. And there’s not much we can do about it.  Fighting the resistance certainly doesn’t help. Because anything we throw at the monster only makes it…

Nobody knows anything.  Everybody’s just guessing. About everything.  Even doctors and scientists and economists and lawyers. And they go to school for eight years.  They’re all just guessing. They’re simply telling he truth as they see it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Reuters recently released a study confirming there are way too many studies. This is not a joke. It’s called attention decay, the phenomenon where the exponential growth in the number of…

Here’s my favorite cheesy joke.  Why did the scarecrow get promoted? Because he was outstanding in his field.  It’s a ridiculous premise, but it actually hits home with me on a deeply personal level. Because unlike the brainless scarecrow, I get down on myself for not standing out and being special in my work.  And not just because I’m a persistent individualist, but also because I’m used to receiving…

There’s a folder on my desktop that contains every project I’ve worked on in the past fifteen years.  Every time I scroll through it, I feel proud, prolific and professional.  But there’s also a folder within that folder, which contains all of the unsuccessful projects and unproductive obsessions and bad ideas that I failed to bring to fruition over the years.  And that’s important too. Because all of those projects had…

Frankl wrote that existence falters unless man has a strong ideal to hold onto.  He coined the term existential vacuum, meaning, the psychological condition in which we doubt that life has any meaning and we become trapped in feelings of aimlessness, emptiness, loss of interest and lack of initiative.  Who hasn’t been there before?  Human beings, after all, are constantly reaching out for meanings to fulfill. Our hearts are restless…

The benefit of hitting bottom is, it causes us to hold a new type of conversation with ourselves.  It forces us to recognize the festering of our own emotions.  The disgust with whom we’ve become is what makes us say, okay we’re ready. This isn’t funny anymore. It’s time for a wholesale cleanup.  Rushdie once joked that one of the great benefits of hitting bottom is, now you know…