Photo by Luís Eusébio on Unsplash Work, Meta-Work, and Why We Fail to Recognize the Most Valuable Things We Should be Managing I would never be so bold as to say that we’ve been looking at productivity all wrong, but I’m going to come close to saying that. I’m doing that because over the past few years,… Read More »Productivity is Dead. Long Live Productivity!
credit: Pim Chu on Unsplash How I finally found an absurdly easy form of meditation that hooks you immediately, and that you’ll want to do every day. I first found out about meditation when I was 19. I was a college sophomore who had broken free of the chains of Midwestern white Christianity and ventured into the… Read More »Why I Fell in Love With Vedic Meditation: My Secret Weapon of Well-Being
credit: Tim Marshall on Unsplash How a single sentence from a mentor made me re-think how I evaluate what it means to be strong and live well. I have been studying philosophy for well over decade now, and I even taught the subject for half a decade. So I like to think that I’ve heard all of… Read More »Uncertainty, Discomfort, and What Makes a Good Life
credit: Úrsula Madariaga And How It Keeps Us From Being Great at Sales, Leadership, Parenting, and Pretty Much Everything Else One of the things that we as humans are not so good at dealing with is when things don’t go the way we’d like them to. Buddhists have a word for the feeling we get… Read More »The Myth of Laziness
Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash In a time when we’re obsessed with gaining knowledge, we must not forget a more vital part of being intelligent. After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much has been made of bubbles. No, not the glorious soap and water creations that my 3 year-old loves to play with, but rather… Read More »Fearless Thinking: A Manifesto for Intellectually Dark Times
credit: Vance Osterhout on Unsplash Chasing after the best of everything actually keeps us from enjoying nearly anything. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I was out to dinner with a co-worker recently. The restaurant was quite nice, and boasted a whole menu of dishes that sounded amazing. This was both of our first times… Read More »Satisficing: A Way Out of the Miserable Mindset of Maximizing
“A perspective shot from a kayak on a rippling lake with the sun setting on the horizon in the distance” by Joshua Ness on Unsplash What the sages of the East can teach us about effort, strategy, and observation. The thing about Eastern philosophies is that they are full of contradictions, but unlike in Western philosophies,… Read More »Wu Wei: The Powerful Path of Non-Action
credit: Jose Aljovin An Essay on the problems with fetishizing focus, and the forgotten magic of things that pull us away from our tasks. When I first got roped into the world of productivity and personal development literature, I became obsessed with an idea: distractions. If you were to make an analogy between that world and zealous… Read More »In Defense of Distractions
An Existential Tribute to the Profound Act of Getting Up When I was in college, I slept in as much as I could. I stayed up late, and tried to savor the night, as if something or someone was going to take them away from me at some point — and I had to savor every last morsel… Read More »The Incomparable Power of Mornings
When I was a kid, my dad was fond of giving folksy advice to help me “make it” — to go far in my professional life. He didn’t go to college, so I definitely should. He took the first decent-paying job that came his way and never weighed his options, so I should be more measured and… Read More »The Interest Principle
