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Nobody likes anything anymore. Everyone is too concerned with being seen as cool and clever, and they can’t accomplish that when they put themselves on the line. Much easier to analyze everything to a pulp. People garner more attention and greater social status by making snide comments, explaining why a thing sucks and why they’re above it. Joy is boring at best and deluded at worst. Part of this…

Here’s proof that pressure is a choice. When was the last time you complained about how you needed to catch up on something? Maybe it was email, television, work, sleep, laundry, life goals, books, podcasts, social media, celebrity gossip, news, whatever. For some reason, you felt a nagging sense of being behind. Like the two women who were seated next to me on the subway. One of them was…

Greed has officially been elevated to the status of virtue. Gekko’s speech comes to mind: Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. But there’s a different brand of greed that’s lesser known. It’s not necessarily the intense and…

This guy at my old office was a total pain in the ass. All he did was complain. And not in that productive startup way, where people channel their frustrations into doing innovative work that solves problems and creates real value in the world. He just bitched. About every little thing. Each new gripe added another drop of swampy backwater of unproductive energy. Reminds me of the morning we came…

My yoga teacher, noticing me sitting out for a few posters during class, once shared the following recommendation. Anytime your body can’t do something, that’s just information. Meaning, it’s not an emergency that calls for swift action. It’s not a trigger for useless rumination. It’s not reason to beat ourselves up for being imperfectly human. It’s just information. And thankfully, the bridge of the breath can be the thing…

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…