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Seneca wrote that greatest peril of misplaced worry is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living.  This insight is particularly appropriate for the experience of making mistakes. Because for many of us, committing simple errors, gaffes and blunders can make us so absorbed in thinking about how completely fucked we are, that it compromises our ability to be present in…

Time, money, love and creativity are the same thing.  They are all forms of energy. They are all currencies that flow to us, flow through us and flow from us, every single day.  But only if we allow them to. Only when our relationship with those energies comes from a place of abundance, generosity, prosperity and gratitude does our cup runneth over.  It reminds me of a colleague of…

Cameron, who spent the past forty years teaching artists around the world how to overcome their creative blocks, found the primary reason writers procrastinate is in order to build up a sense of deadline.  Deadlines create a flow of adrenaline, and adrenaline medicates the censor.  We all have worked with somebody like this. The crisis maker, drama queen or avoidance junkie. Somebody who knowingly puts things off to the last minute…

According to the fire protection association, the three conditions that must be present for wildfire to burn are fuel, air and heat.  Firefighters have aptly named this the fire triangle.  The fuel comes from any flammable material, like grasses, trees, brush or homes.  The heat comes from sources like campfires and hot winds and cigarettes, which brings the fuel to temperatures hot enough to ignite.  And oxygen, which is…

Batman noted that some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They cannot be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.  This personality is the exception, not the rule.  All nihilistic face painting criminal masterminds aside, the majority of human beings are natural hackers and fixers and improvers. It’s one of the central ways that we rail against the seeming…

It’s easy to get discouraged when we get so many rejections.  Each time we hear no, it chips away another chunk of our confidence, making us feel just a little more insecure than the time before.  And so, because rejection can take such an emotional toll us on, it’s our responsibility to restore the balance. To double down on rebuilding our spirits and buoying our faith during threatening times. …

We want extreme change and we want it now.  We settle for nothing less than a tornado of sweeping transformations and dramatic revolutions that come swiftly and broadly, leaving us permanently altered for better for always.  Unfortunately, nature doesn’t care how we prefer to change. It has its own agenda. One that must be respected if we are to live in harmony with it.  And in some cases, that…

Optimism is not about denying reality, it’s about discerning which reality to focus our energy on.  It’s a choice we make in each moment. A simple matter of proportion, perception and principle.  Let’s explore a few examples.  Instead of eulogizing our negativity, we choose to see and build upon the good in every moment. Trusting that this is only the beginning and more is on the way.  Instead of…

Carlin notoriously wrote that the innocent victim was an outmoded idea. That there are no innocent victims. And if you’re born into this world, you’re guilty, period, fuck you, end of report, next case. Your birth certificate is proof of guilt.  It was always one of my favorite bits.  All comedy aside, though, what the hippie dippy weatherman was hinting at was something terrifying that we rarely confront: We…

Heidegger, the seminal existentialist philosopher, believed that language was the house of being. In his famous letter on humanism, he wrote: In this home of language, man dwells. Those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech.  Insanely dense and abstract and difficult to read,…