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We’ve always been told that comedy is tragedy plus time. Maybe the equation of the self works in a similar way. What if maturity was just identity plus time? After all, knowing who we are isn’t the hard part. Knowing how to use who we are to navigate the losses, rejections, failures, mistakes and transitions life throws at us, that’s the real work. Opening ourselves to the wisdom that…

When success comes to us fast, early and often, it’s not unusual to think that it will keep coming. When we’re young and naïve and the whole world is still in front of us, of course nothing could possibly block the flow of good in our lives. We’re bulletproof. But one of the lessons we learn as we get older is, attachment often means thinking that the good times…

Client services is an inherently stressful business model. Here’s why. Companies that hire your agency to do marketing or public relations or consulting are essentially paying you for something else. To worry for them. That’s what your monthly fee goes toward. Outsourced anxiety. And such, clients not only want, but expect their agencies to be neurotic. Practically twenty four hours a day. Think of it from their perspective. If…

It’s called the pursuit of happiness because it takes real work. And the mistake we make along the way is believing that happiness is intentional. It’s not. Happiness is incidental. It’s a side effect. It’s not the target, it’s the reward we get for hitting it. Maybe instead of buying into the happiness industrial complex, what would be more productive is an apprenticeship in the art of acceptance. Not…

My psychologist friend says the most dangerous part about being a gambling addict is that you have hope. You always maintain the obsessive belief that you’re just one bet away from turning it all around, solving all your problems and getting back on your feet. That’s right man, after this last big score, it’s smooth sailing from here on out. No more hemorrhaging cash, dragging my family into debt…

Some people have a straight vector line, right out of the womb. They don’t waver and wrestle with those identity doubts that plague the most of us. All they know is, there’s this thing that sticks inside of them that says, you were born for this, and so, they never even consider doing or being anything else. Palnik, one of my favorite cartoonists, was showing his books and prints…

What if you were independent of the outer world as your primary source of satisfaction? What if you were not burdened by the weariness of all those externally generated demands? Calm and content, that’s what you would be. Imagine if your mechanism of fulfillment was your own. It would become this priceless possession nobody could take away from you. It would become lever you could pull to transform your…

Once we learn to forgive ourselves and accept our own humanity, we can awake from the sleep of guilt and start using it as fuel. We can transform guilt into an emotion that fuels our growth. It starts by noticing the feeling and asking it what it wants from us. Is this feeling inviting me to connect with my moral compass and values as a person? Is this feeling…

Clemens, at the tail end of his pitching career, negotiated a contract where he only played in home games. That way, he could drive to work and not go on the road. No coping with changing time zones or climates, no dealing with the rigors of travel, and no working through the idiosyncrasies of other ballparks and their moronic, hateful fans. Houston or bust. This sounds like an extreme…

The term protestant work ethic was coined in the early nineteen hundreds. But it wasn’t until about seventy years later than a pair of clinical psychologists created a scale by which to measure it. Here are a few of my favorite questions from the framework: *People who fail at a job have usually not tried hard enough. *Our society would have fewer problems if people had less leisure time….