Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

The academic community has greeted grit with a degree of breathless enthusiasm. People have been applauding grit as the trait among traits that helps people persevere. But too much perseverance can be costly. One study demonstrated how grittier individuals might incur some costs by persisting when they could move on. Lucas, the primary researcher, explored grit through the lens of test taking. She found that certain students might not…

Wearing a nametag all the time helps me understand myself more, but it also provides me with an instant psychological analysis of others. It’s a small, repeatable, portable filter that helps me make sense of those who interact with me. It’s not scientific, it’s not one hundred percent accurate, it’s more of a novelty personality test. And yet, it never ceases to amaze me what kinds of insights people…

Stress doesn’t kill us, our reaction to it does. We suffer because we let other people’s emergencies become our crisis. And not to be uncompassionate to their struggle. Everybody hurts, to quote the classic nineties song, but at some point, we have to set a boundary, so their stuff doesn’t become ours. Otherwise we’ll drench our nervous system with a cocktail of frustration and pay the price long after…

More and more hospitals and health clinics are practicing something called whole person care. If you’re like me and you read medical journals from the national institute of health for fun, you will notice that healthcare professionals are trained to practice several things. See the person as a whole and in the context of his or her family and wider social environment. Take continuity of responsibility for people’s care across many…

When we start using words like always and never, that means our brain is messing with us. Even if it is comforting in the moment to have something black and white to hang our hats on, engaging in these all or nothing, now or never demands often make things worse, not better. Phycologists call it dichotomous thinking or cognitive distortions. And the danger is, our overreactions in response to…