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If you never do something, it requires no restraint to maintain that habit
Moderation has never really worked for my personality. Despite my best efforts to adopt an everything in moderation maxim, turns out I’m an all or nothing kind of. Timing and monitoring and measuring my effort doesn’t motivate me, it exhausts and frustrates me. Framing my level of activity and consumption as sensible, whatever the hell that means, only ruins the experience for me. Unlike some people, occasionally indulging doesn’t…
The worse someone feels, the more honesty we should wield
In a sad, grieving, anxious or depressed person’s mind, their fears are completely normal. You can spend all the time in the world promising them that they are not sick, but they’re often unwilling to believe loved ones or even doctors who try to reassure them. In which case, the only effective way to deal with their irrational thinking is to just play along for their peace of mind….
And poof, one day the goddess of talent abandons us
Who are we when all of our gifts are stripped away? Is that person still worthy? It’s tough to imagine when we’ve invested so much time working on ourselves. Think about the sheer amount of time and energy spent. We treat ourselves as the possessors of unique gifts. We carry the blueprint of them and notice their unfolding. We slowly emerge into the full flower of our gifts through…
That’s the great thing about data, it doesn’t judge you
What should we care about? When humanity is dealing with numerous overlapping traumas, how are we supposed to know which problems to prioritize? There are no easy and simple answers for these questions, because there’s a mob mentality on what is important. Social pressure often decides what issues deserve our time, money and energy. The squeaky wheels gets the attentional oil. In fact, people might even call you out…
Until blood spurts and bits of flesh fly
Discipline takes care of you in ways that motivation can’t. Because your action isn’t conditional on feelings or mood, it hinges on commitment. Your fuel is not desire but will. Whereas if you work from a place of motivation, there is a particular mental and emotional state necessary to complete your task. Which you may or may not be able to access at any given moment. And that gives…
Bring talent to the table that’s transferable everywhere you go
In concentration camps, certain prisoners were selected by their captors to hold more advantaged positions within the population of the camp. Since these people possessed creative, linguistic or industrial skills, the guards viewed them as valuable assets. They gave them access to material benefits beyond those available to others, like warmer clothes, better shelter and more food. My friend wrote and directed a documentary about this very phenomenon. The…
Create a positive trajectory of entrepreneurial functioning
Did you know that resilience was somebody’s job? I stumbled upon a fascinating study in the international journal of management about the construct of organizational resilience. In the last few decades, this phenomenon has gained new momentum in academic literature, mainstream media and business publications. Numerous researchers revealed that companies, institutions and other entitles can survive and thrive amidst adversity or turbulence. As long as there are dedicated team…
The mental equivalent of a taffy pulling machine
People can spend an inordinate amount time worrying about, analyzing, and trying to understand or clarify particular thoughts and themes. They’ll engage in this exhausting a repetitive negative thought process that loops continuously in their mind without end or completion. As if replaying a certain scenario enough times could somehow change its outcome. Like the single woman who keeps reading the same text message over and over again, searching…
Questioning everything all of the time is exhausting and dumb
Innovation hinges on the ability to ask one crucial question. What if? It’s the fundamental thought experiment that challenges assumptions, explores possibilities and drives human imagination. Take a glance at your surroundings right now, and you’ll seen hundreds of objects that only exist because somebody somewhere asked the question, what if. As an example, on desk at this very moment is a bottle of sparkling water. But it’s not…
The variable is the rest of the world
A social experiment is a type of research. In fields like psychology and sociology, scientists are seeing how people behave in certain situations and respond to particular policies or programs. They divide individuals into two groups. Active participants, those who take action in an event, and respondents, those who react to the action, often who are unaware they’re part of the experiment. The goal, of course, is to monitor…
