Damon D'Amore

* 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.”

* How To Maximize Serendipity: “Serendipity is a state of mind. Serendipity births unexpected opportunities which fuel progress and push us in fruitful directions. Serendipity is a skill, which means it can be learned.”

* On Defending Your Time: “One thing at a time doesn’t mean one thing, then another thing, then another thing in quick succession.”

* Thinking Around Human Bling Spots: “We can take some idea and spin a complete and compelling story around it…and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s right.”

* The Argument For Spending More Time Outdoors: “We think shopping makes us happy, or streaming Netflix, eating ice cream—and those things do make us happy, but we get a tremendous boost from being outside in a natural.”

* The Origins of Greed and Fear: “The two traits evolve from something innocent: the amount of confidence we have that our actions influence our outcomes.”

* How To Do Great Things: “Moving forward requires change but change does not mean that you are moving forward.”

* Maximizing Creativity: “We don’t see the universe as it is; we see it as we are.”

* Mindless Resolutions: “Resolutions don’t stick because they’re tactics, not systems. They’re strategies, not philosophies.”

* Life and Business Lessons from Morgan Housel: “Part of the reason pessimism is more seductive than optimism is because it’s easy to underestimate our ability to change in the future.”

* Why Delayed Gratification Works: “You can create a masterpiece in two days – after years of effort.”

* Why Insecure People Buy More Things: Why Insecure People Buy More Things: “Money may not buy you love, but it won’t break your heart either.”

* Less Focus on Specific Goals and More Focus On Practicing Life: “Life satisfaction is a byproduct of transitioning from being a seeker, or someone who wants a certain lifestyle, to a practitioner, or someone who lives that lifestyle day in and day out.”

* On Going Deep Versus Going Broad: “Depth wasn’t so much a game of persistently striving to top myself, it was more like a new lens for looking at the tools and opportunities that had always been there.”