Blog

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….

If you don’t make a name for yourself, someone will make one for you. This has been a mantra of mine ever since my first book went viral, which led to my appearance on a nationally syndicated news program. Millions of viewers saw my debut interview, which had the following job title underneath my head. Nametag wearer. How proud my parents must have been. Four years of college and…

There is no success or failure, there is only what happens. Consequences of our actions. Right or wrong, good or bad, win or lose, positive or negative, these are just words. Mental constructs. Socially inherited labels that we attach to our experiences. They have no moral and objective meaning. There is no tribunal that decide which result is the best. Sadly, human beings love to compartmentalize. It’s embedded in…

Thor, the god of thunder, was given a memorable piece of advice from his mother: Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be. But the measure of a person, a hero, is how they succeed at being who they are. Her words suggest a question that most of us have probably never asked. What kind of relationship do we have with milestones? That’s a big word in our culture….