You can’t stand on ground that isn’t there yet

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 world, even the one around you was crumbling into bits. My...

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 asking to be used for positive action and not punishment? If...

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 contractual demand, but then again, if you're the most dominant pitcher...

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. *Life would have very little meaning if people never had to...

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 that’s what my degree yielded. And not that the producers were...