In the classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (affiliate link), the grandfather of modern productivity, Stephen R. Covey, has some sage advice: Focus on your area of influence. It’s sensible. Why waste your time and energy on things that are outside of your control? Still, I struggle with this — and I […]
Things I'm reading
Habits + Creativity
I’m fascinated by habits — how they serve us, how they hurt us, how to create them, how to break them. I’m also fascinated by creativity — how we combine what we’ve learned to build new things, how we block our own creativity and how we can release it, how creativity heals us and connects […]
Breath + Focus
I never gave much thought to the way I breathe — outside of the context of meditation or yoga, at least. All I could really tell you is that with persistent allergies, and the inflammation and congestion that comes with them, I’ve always struggled to breathe through my nose. In yoga, they tell you to […]
What Life Expects from Us
“… it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning We’re six months into the COVID-19 crisis. It seems like the world has gone insane in that time. I don’t know about you, but I have days where I want […]
Removing the Social Media Temptation
I was flipping through one of my (many, MANY) notebooks this morning and found this note on the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman: Self-control and cognitive efforts are forms of mental work. Studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely […]
Truth and Lying Birds
I’m listening to the audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers right now — and it’s disturbing. There is a lot more lying and general deception going on amongst us humans than we’d like to admit. And we’re not very good at telling when when people are lying to our faces. Interestingly, though, Gladwell […]
