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One reason so many people just surrender to the status quo and do nothing is because they’re tired. Not physically tired, like when you need sleep, finish a marathon or work two double shifts back to back. Rather, they’re tired because of decision fatigue. They’ve been making too many choices. They haven’t figured out how to simply their daily lives by deferring, delegating or deleting the work inside their…

The expression, buttering me up, means to overly flatter someone in the hopes of getting something in return. The phrase has religious origins. Hindu temples popularized the ritual hundreds of years ago, where worshippers would throw balls of ghee, clarified butter, at statues of their deities. By buttering up the gods, so to speak, worshippers would be rewarded with peace and good harvest. What’s interesting to me is when…

My friend is a vegetarian, but he calls himself a recovering vegan. His favorite joke about his former diet is, vegans don’t care about animals, they just want to be angry. It’s an extreme stereotype, but it does make me wonder about the emotion of anger and what it does to us. Because being mad can be deeply empowering. We feel energized and righteous when we’re angry, but that…

The instructor of my public speaking course once gave our class the following advice on mindset: Most people want you to succeed. You’re the only one who doesn’t. What a profound insight. Not just for giving presentations, but for delivering any kind of work to the world. Because so many of us talk to ourselves in ways that sabotage our own performance. We say things that we would never…

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds hospitality. When people are better friends, better service happens naturally. Because it’s not a nametag, it’s a permission slip. It’s funny, companies stress the importance of having employees wear nametags. But what if their customers wore nametags? That would add a whole new layer of humanity to the interaction. Reminds me of riding the hotel shuttle during a snowstorm. It was midnight. The…

Although our eyes grow accustomed to the dark, every incident can still be brought into its proper light. No matter what catastrophe befalls us, there are always questions that we can pose to improve our overall internal experience. How could you take a broader view here? Are you considering the immediate condition in light of your whole journey? What if you assessed your experience proportionally within the realm of…

Bohr once joked that it’s very hard to predict, especially the future. But something that’s not as hard is understanding the present. Because as baffling and uncertain as life can be, what’s happening right in front of our noses is typically simpler than we might realize. It just takes a little compassion. Let’s say a colleague at work expresses sudden and malicious feelings towards us during a staff meeting….

A coworker of mine once listed me as a reference for a potential job offer. It was an honor to be asked, so I was happy to vouch for his talents. During the call with the hiring manager from his potential employer, there was one question that stood out to me: How well would you say he manages emotions? It made me laugh, since the candidate in question was…

One of my old coworkers was a highly anxious person. She sweat like a whore in church on a daily basis, and it was disruptive to the rest of the team, not to mention her own psyche. Here’s an example. When midday comes around, she starts pacing around the office, complaining about how she’s hungry, asking other people whether or not they’re hungry, working herself into a pointless tizzy…

Ellis writes that our need to impress others and to win their approval, and thereby view ourselves as a good person, leads to an obsession that tends to preempt a large part of our life. We wind up seeking status instead of seeking joy. Do you know anyone like that? The person who needs everyone to notice, like and even love their work in order to feel grounded? It…