What I’m Reading

* The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship: “People who are on the energetic, motivated, and creative side are both more likely to be entrepreneurial and more likely to have strong emotional states. Those states may include depression, despair, hopelessness, worthlessness, loss of motivation, and suicidal thinking.”

* The Importance of Knowing Yourself: “Don’t let anyone decide who you are.”

* How Experiences Influence How You Think About Risk and Reward: “People with different experience than us aren’t necessarily smarter. Part of why learning through experience isn’t necessarily good or bad is due to the lessons we take away from experience.”

* Why Smart People Fall For Fads: “Two of the three variables are highly relevant to why smart people fall for fads: 1. Our need for control over our lives; 2. Our need for belonging.”

* Why Every Detail of Your Craft Matters (PODCAST): “I don’t have a problem catering to individual needs, but if I’m going to do it, then I’ve got to do it my way and just make it better than what the perception would have been.”

* Go Deeper Not Wider: “By taking a whole year to go deeper instead of wider, you end up with a rich but carefully curated collection of personal interests, rather than the hoard of mostly-dormant infatuations that happens so easily in post-industrial society.”

* Living a Values-Driven Life in the Face of Trauma: “When you give up the control agenda and stop pouring your energy into trying to escape, avoid or extinguish difficult feelings, you free up space to work towards your values, which leads to more meaningful living.”

* Why You Procrastinate: “Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods…”

* Death, Taxes, and a Few Other Things: “Empathy and putting-yourself-in-others’-shoes only go so far.”

* Counter-intuitive Competitive Advantages: “Scared and running > fat and happy.”

* Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed “A heartfelt rant about how our work makes us so tired and unfulfilled that we give the money right back.”

* Separating Identity From Passion: “Identities seem permanent, but they are in fact malleable. It may seem like we are stuck as who we are, but our stories can be altered.”

* The Shadow Side of Greatness: “Success in one area is often tied to failure in another area, especially at the extreme end of performance. The more extreme the greatness, the longer the shadow it casts.”

* Why Second Chances Are Important: “My whole life is a second chance. People need (and usually deserve) second chances because often the first version of themselves they put out into the world is not even close to the finished product they’ll want everyone to see them as.”

* Overcoming Your Demons: Morgan’s struggle with stuttering and his public-facing career.

* What Is Amazon? An amazingly detailed essay on Amazon, Walmart and retail.

* Getting Busy on the Proof: “We tend to equate or at least connect intelligence and rational thinking. However, intelligent people can and do believe crazy things. It is highly likely that you and I believe crazy things.”

* What The Hell Is Going On? “A snapshot of our current place in history related to commerce, education, information scarcity and politics.”

* The Passion Paradox: “Intensity and drive can be great. It is often the gateway to flow states, or those times when you are completely in the zone, fully absorbed in what you are doing. Intensity and drive can also lead to anxiety, burnout, and even cheating and fraud.”

* Not Caring Is A Powerful Skill: “Figure out what you can control and obsess over it. Identify what doesn’t matter and ignore it. Determine what you’re incapable of and stay away from it.”

* Defining Your Values (NSFW): “We are defined by what we choose to find important in our lives. We are defined by our prioritizations.”

* The Art of Repetition: “If you want to create lasting habits you must develop a high tolerance for repetition.”

* “Discovering The Benefits Of An Unbalanced Life.” Podcast Interview with Brad Stulberg (co-author, The Passion Paradox): A great interview on self-compassion, mindfulness and personal performance.

* How Our Reaction To Failure Influences Future Performance: “As human beings, we are inherently lazy creatures. Couple this with our need to protect our ego, and you get a dangerous combination of a tendency to want to assign blame to recent external items.”

* Have We Reached Peak Big?: “No one can know what will happen on the other side of the peak, but eventually we might all in fact be going over the bar backward.”

* Pure Downside, No Silver Lining: “Pessimism is usually just extrapolating bad events without considering the offsetting reactions that push things in the other direction. That’s why it’s often wrong.”

* Life Lessons By Daniel Kahneman: “After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.”

* Workism Is Making People Miserable: “For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver.”

* Different Kinds of Stupid: “Smart is the ability to solve hard problems, which can be done many ways. Stupid is a tendency to not comprehend easy problems. It’s also is a diversified trait.”

* Wise People Have Rules For Themselves: “Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches—they’re behavioral boundary markers you get to position yourself, through your own experience and wisdom. A good personal standard clarifies and simplifies, eliminating what would be countless painful decision points. ”

* Why Are People Miserable At Work?: “For years young people have been advised to “follow your passion.” When that advice proved fruitless (and for the majority of people it truly is), people began to benchmark themselves against others. Everything becomes a game of relativity.”

* On Honest Self-Assessment: “Am I slipping? I don’t think so. I think I’m still what I set out to be.”

* An EPIC Tweet Storm About New Years Resolutions: “I told some co-workers at my ex-employer about the blog and they mostly mocked it. There was even a betting pool for how many weeks before I gave up.”

* How To Be  A Calmer Person: “Knowing that you can’t force unpleasant emotions away, try being aware of them instead of fighting with them.”

* You Can’t Meditate Wrong: “It’s just being yourself, being your experience of this moment, over and over. It’s simple but, if we’re honest, not always easy.”

* What If Someone Copies Your Business Idea?: “Anything that can be copied will be copied. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don’t have an “edge” just because you’re passionate, hard-working, or “lean.””

* The Best Way To Learn Anything: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

* How To Improve Your Speech: “We teach children how to write, but not how to speak.”

* The KonMari Method to Tidy Your Mind: “You live simple, you train hard, and live an honest life. Then you are free.”