Blog Post

* Fear Is Contagious – So Is Courage: “How we feel affects how we think and how we think affects how we feel.”

* Go To The Weak Spots To Get Stronger: “One of the best ways to get stronger is to stop suppressing your fears and weaknesses and instead lean into them, with the support of others when necessary.”

* How To Keep Your Cool (book recommendation): “Your anger is a kind of madness, because you set a high price on worthless things.” 

* A Better Way To Respond To Cravings: “The more familiar you are with the life cycle of cravings, the less trapped you feel by them. You begin to see that cravings aren’t impasses that demand a hard choice, they’re sensory events that arise and pass.”

* 100 Little Ideas: “A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works.”

* When to Trust Your Gut: “Our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential.”

*The Secret To Resilience Is A Good Story: “The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are extremely powerful. They have a significant and lasting impact on our lives. Craft yours wisely.”

* How to Write Usefully: “The exciting thing is not that there’s a lot left to write, but that there’s a lot left to discover.”

* What We Can Learn From Regret And Nostalgia (audio): “Regret is the second-most mentioned emotion in daily life. It has a negative association but is actually extremely helpful and positive.”

* Having Difficult Conversations: “Productive conversations take real empathy. Empathy works. It’s not only human and caring; it’s practical.”

* How to Practice Loving-Kindness: “I discovered that while loving-kindness is taught in many ways by different teachers, ultimately it is an equalizer. It is a state that can be developed through practices that help us cultivate the unconditional, expansive qualities of the heart.”

* How To Read A Book: Reading a book is a way to temporarily walk into someone else’s shoes. How much you want to understand the way they think and see the world is up to you.”

* Structured Procrastination: “One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent.”

* The Curse of Ambition: Steven Pressfield and Ryan Holiday (video): “On Kobe Bryant, Alexander The Great and Ambition.”

* How To Be More Optimistic: “Optimism can be learned.”

* The Power Of Great Feedback (video): “How to give clear feedback to others in order to unleash their potential.”

* Self-Competition: Only Compete With Your Past Self: “When you try to compete with others, you are following rules instead of creating your own game.”

* Financial Advice For My New Daughter: “Her only job now is eating and sleeping. But, one day, when she needs financial advice, here’s what I’ll tell her.”

* I Don’t Know: “The pursuit of ignorance will help you grow. Next time you don’t know the answer, see if you can will yourself to tell the other person ‘I don’t know.'”

* What To Do When It All Goes Wrong: “One of the hardest things to do is to get out of a rut. When things are going poorly, and you know you can do better. And you’re helpless.”

* It’s Better To Focus On Where You Are Going Than How You Are Feeling: “Think of valued living as going about your daily life in the service of values that you find important, whereby engaging in these actions creates a sense of meaning and purpose.”

* The Illusory Truth Effect: “Truth is a precarious thing, not because it doesn’t objectively exist, but because the incentives to warp it can be so strong.”

* How to Create Gratitude: “It’s important that it’s an ordinary moment, because those are the kinds of moments that often seem neutral in value. Abundant and unremarkable.”

* Emotionally Intelligent People Insert a Pause Between Action And Reaction: “Understanding your emotions is great, but what’s even more useful for you is making use of that knowledge.”

* Even The Best Are Really Bad At Part Of Their Job: “Olympians who participate in some of the hardest endurance races there are finishing in the BOTTOM 20% of the Grit Scale.”

* The Difference Between Getting By and Getting Better: “When you’re a kid learning to navigate life, you inevitably find certain things particularly challenging. So you figure out a way to get by.”

* Seth Godin / Brian Koppelman Interview on Professionals versus Hacks

* The Narrative Fallacy: “The deep structure of the mind is such that stories, reasons, and causes, things that points an arrow in the direction of Why, are the ones that stick most deeply.”

* Why Trying Too Hard Can Be Counterproductive: “If we can overcome the instinct to get in our own way and be more comfortable trusting in our innate abilities, the results may well be surprising.”

*Time Anxiety: “Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”

* Lessons from Roger Federer on Emotional Intelligence and Mental Toughness: “It is through modeling our behavior, in replication of transcendent people of high achievement that practice and preach time-tested values, that motivates us to high-levels of accomplishment.”

*11 Reasons Not to Become Famous: “If you’re interested in building a large audience to become rich and famous, some warnings and recommendations are in order. If you’re interested in building a large audience you also truly care about and with whom you are vulnerable, even more precautionary tales are in order.”