We recently packed up everything and moved to a smaller place. This means that anything truly important to me, that I need to get stuff done, is most likely packed up in a box in storage. It’s not chaos exactly, or disorder. It’s just that everything is ten times harder than it needs to be.…
One of the things that surprised Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi when he was doing surveys about pleasure and enjoyment was the universal agreement on what constituted an enjoyable experience. He found that people from all cultures, all stages of life shared the same sense of what made an activity truly enjoyable. Moreover, widely differing activities from art…
In a podcast about “Slow Productivity” Cal Newport suggests that organizations could do a lot to prevent employee burnout by shifting their goals to quality of output over quantity. This would let workers do their jobs at a more natural pace, working the way our brains are wired. But let’s say we can’t wait for…
The other morning I had a mind-blowing revelation – this breaking news that has people freaking out – it’s all bullshit. There’s a bigger problem facing us and we don’t even see it. The insight came to me while I was headed for work southbound on the 101 freeway, taking a break from the headlines…
What’s your go-to move when you feel yourself on the verge of a freak-out? Telling yourself to take a deep breath and chill out might be exactly the wrong strategy. PysBlog reports on research by Alison Woods Brooks that suggests that hitting the emotional gas pedal might get you into the clear. Subjects who told…
There’s a little bit of Jay Gatsby in each of us. To live in America is to be surrounded on all sides by a narrative that says you can be anything you want to be. You can reinvent yourself, leave your past behind, move out West, reach for the stars, follow your dreams. But maybe…
