Is it your job? Your house? The kind of car you drive, or your clothes? You physical fitness? Your weekend hobbies? Theoretically, it doesn’t seem like much. But placing too much stake in any of these transient things can be devastating in the long run. COVID has shown how quickly most of what we take …
I stumbled across Tim Ferriss’s podcast a few years ago. One of his first guests, Ryan Holiday, caught my attention, so I checked out some of his work. Ryan often relates back to Stoic philosophers and cites Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as a life-changing book, so I eventually bought a copy and checked it out. Within …
Yesterday I touched on the importance of deeper beliefs during our decision making processes, using exercise as an example. Anyone who consistently exercises doesn’t do it because they make a conscious decision to exercise each time. They do it because they’ve internalized health as part of their lifestyle and made it part of who they …
There’s an old cliché in the sales profession – no one wants to buy a drill bit. Even when a customer shows up to the hardware store looking for a drill bit, they don’t care about the bit itself. What they need is a hole in their wall. The amateur salesperson sells the features of …
There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative. Another is to work through some of life’s hardest knocks—loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure—and to find understanding and solace. …
Yesterday, I wrote about the roles our beliefs play in our response to the things that happen around us. A hypothetical situation in which we were cut-off by a pedestrian helped to show how much these beliefs matter. We can easily forgive a child or a blind woman who “doesn’t know better,” but we hold …
Cause and effect. I shove my pencil off my desk. It falls to the ground. I have a sip of water. I no longer feel thirsty. A pedestrian cuts me off. I get angry. Not so fast. Sure, having someone walk in front of our car is usually enough to get our blood boiling, but …
How much of the credit do we deserve when something goes right, and how much of the blame do we deserve when it goes wrong? If we assume that luck over our lifetime equals out (which is a reasonable assumption) then we deserve no more credit than we are willing to accept blame. If we …
On a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Kevin Hart said the following, “If I’m going to do something, then I should never do it halfway. And that means that if I do want to do it halfway, I’m not going to do it. If I’m not doing it to show what I can do to …
The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that …