I turn 32 today. You know how sometimes you reach another birthday and wonder where the time went? I don't have that sense this year. That's probably because a lot has changed since my last birthday. One thing hasn't: I still hold myself accountable for producing a list of things I've (re-)learned during my recent… Continue reading Turning 32: Insert Witty Subtitle Here
We've all felt it. You become fascinated by a new idea and spend hours obsessively reading everything you can about it. You meet someone new and are blown away by them. You find a new job opportunity and refresh your email every fifteen seconds, hoping for an offer. Suddenly, the ground you walk on is… Continue reading How to Enjoy a Period of Change
I'm turning 31 this year. Of course, nobody has big, audacious plans for their 31st birthday. But any birthday is a good time to pause and take stock of my life. I've learned a lot in the past year, including many things I never wanted to know. But I was lucky - the past year… Continue reading Turning 31: Lessons From a Year of Lockdown
My alarm beeped. I jolted awake as the early morning San Francisco sunlight cut through the fog and poured through the open blinds. I groggily pulled my bath towel snug around my shoulders in a futile attempt to guard against the cold of my heatless room. I rolled over, my head on the edge of… Continue reading Fear Setting: How to Do Great Big Things
Adolph Fischer was not a happy man. Fischer was a labor leader in the late 1800s and spent his short life in poverty. His primary claim to fame was being accused, based on perjured testimony, of inciting the Haymarket riots. He was nowhere near them. Fischer was sentenced to death by hanging due to this… Continue reading Why Your Imagination Will Ruin Your Future (and How to Stop It)
Let's say I offer you a chance to peer into a tiny box. In the box, there's a card. On the card, there's a number. The number is how many hours you have left to live. It would take a lot of courage to look at that number. But you're young and healthy, so you… Continue reading Playing Grand Theft Life
Common sense and anecdotal evidence suggest finding a life partner is a crapshoot. Like craps, it's a game that few people win - a third of people never get married, and about 40% of married couples end up running for the exit at some point. Yes, some of these are second and third marriages, but… Continue reading How Likely Are You to Find a Life Partner?
I was an economics major in college, which means I heard the terms "rational consumer" and "opportunity cost" a lot. The former was pretty clearly a joke - a cursory glance reveals that few people behave rationally as defined by the whiteboard and dry erase marker crowd. If they did, sales of compressed carbon (diamonds)… Continue reading Pruning the Possibility Tree: The Simplest Way to Make Better Decisions
A few months back, I listened to Pete Holmes interview Ryan Holiday on the You Made It Weird podcast. Holiday described his parents' visit to see him in Texas, during which they planned a day trip to a town called Clovis. Holiday was incensed that his parents - who came from California to spend time… Continue reading Minimize Your Urge to Maximize
"We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works." Seneca I've always struggled to retain certain information. Unfortunately, it often applied to topics… Continue reading Mental Mentors