Life Lessons

5 Things I Had to Give Up To be Successful

An uncomfortable but powerful truth that took most of my 20’s to internalize: There’s…

I challenged myself to land my first backflip within one month of practice. Here’s what happened.

Start Doing These 9 Things For Yourself Every Day To Immediately Improve Your Life

Why I left a big, prestigious law firm to become an account specialist at a startup

The Path to a Meaningful Life

Sinclair Community College Commencement

How I Re-designed My Life

The story of how I changed my life and ended up in UX

10 THINGS YOU HAVE TO DO IF YOU WERE FIRED YESTERDAY

(plus: Why I Owe Bernie Madoff My Life)

Downgrade your Phone to Upgrade your Brain (and Butt)

The Desperation of Deceit: How the Wiles of Entrepreneurship Led a Cofounder to Commit the Unthinkable

3 Key Ideas from ZERO TO ONE — And Why I’m Not Convinced

How to push past the trolls and get the help you need on Stack Overflow

A little time management can make you a way better designer

Anchoring: A Simple Storytelling Trick to Make Data Approachable and Memorable

Topic of the day: The importance of learning another language

The Best Way to Follow Your Dreams Is by Keeping Your Day Job

Dog is God

Think about every single quality that you aspire to in life:

• Bravery

88. Is it better to be underestimated or overestimated?

Why I Am Leaving the Best Company I’ll Ever Work For

My Top Five Amazing Post Apocalyptic Self Improvement Hacks That You Need to Action Today

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

The oddest realization came to me a day after I almost took my life. My father told me he needed me to keep going. So did my friends.

The pressure to be positive always

I think this will be a long post but I must write it. Was in two minds whether to post it here or…

How to cure dumbness

They say you become who you hang out with. I can vouch for that.

May 8: Tito’s pregame minutiae

Highlights from manager Terry Francona’s Monday media session…

Leaning Out: Why time away from work is necessary and important

15 Biggest Entrepreneurial & Life Lessons From 500 Founder Interviews

From The App Guy Podcast

Is it Stupid to Make Art When the World is Going to Sh*t?

I think maybe that’s when we need it most.

Growth Is Impossible Without This

It all starts here. In order to build a safe container you must practice transparency. Remember, a…

Jane Hertzmark Hudis On Finding Energy In The Challenges That Lie Ahead

The Group President at The Estée Lauder Companies shares her pre-bed routine and her favorite childhood book.

How to Plan a Healthy, Happy Postpartum

By Allie Chee.

How Comcast Created My Powerful Alter Ego

Raise your hand if you’ve been a victim of Comcast customer…

People Want You to Stay in Your Limits.

Break out and raise the standard.

Why I Embrace My Pain Now Instead of Numbing It

I Hate Office Politics.

I hate office politics. I hate them so much that I often contemplate quitting so I can start my own business but I know I’ll end up dealing with a different type of politics.

This year the politics at work are so much tenser than usual. We have the head boss…

Why I Cried After ‘Fast and Furious’ Won MTV’s “Generation Award”

And yes, I’m pathetically pathetic

what is mediocrity?

medio + ocris: Latin for “middle of a stony mountain.”

not at the top, not at the bottom. just middling.

or is it the peak?

is it the middle path?

On Heaving Anchors and Dropping Them Where You Want

Or: Why You Should Grab An Opportunity Like Remote Year

By Stephan van Duin, originally written in November 2015

Why you’ll never be successful doing your own thing

No matter how much people will tell you that you have to bet on your strengths, that you have to follow your passion, that you have to do what you love and what not, it’s very likely that you’ll never succeed.

Have I Changed?

I get this question a lot. Probably most of us do. Sometimes more of a taunt than a question maybe. You have changed!

Dreaming up Atlantis: Chapter 1

God Save the Dreamers

What do you want to be when you grow up? The question is asked to every kid. The answer is supposed to be whimsical. I thought that was the point. How can a small child plan for their future when they are still…

Letters from Aradhita Wadhwa

I often recall a story that captures human life and its trajectory in reverse. In the story, a blank journey…

20 Things To Do With Your Family — Besides Being Busy

At first, all the free time was disorienting…

Why is it so scary to ask for what you want in life?

Ten things I Learned in India: A Reflection in Installments.

How to Give Yourself Permission to Take What You Really Need

Often the last person we give permission…

You Need to Say “No” More

“If it’s not a ‘Hell yeah!’ it’s a no.” -Derek Sivers

Why You Should Forget Success And Pursue Failure

Failure is the currency with which success is…

Why Should I Invest?

You work hard for your money, but are you making your money work hard for you?

Like another commenter, my wife sells LuLaRoe. She doesn’t have any “downlines,” and has made back her initial investment. We’re not getting rich, certainly, and she’s working hard on top of her regular job. But she believes in the product, and enjoys what she’s doing. And when she doesn’t anymore, she’ll stop. But we won’t be in the hole from it…

Día libre, chilenos mala onda y la mafia rusa

Fucking assholes

Cuando estás casada, tienes tres hijas, dos perros, un conejo, vives en el extranjero sin ningún familiar, trabajas como traductora independiente a veces hasta las 2 am y tienes que preocuparte de…

Ardhanārīśvara (अर्धनारीश्वर) is said to convey the unity of opposites in the universe in a

How to be confident

The internet is full of articles and videos that supposedly teach how to be confident. Most of this shit is useless because confidence is an incredibly complex subject and takes sustained work to develop and maintain. There is no magic formula for confidence, and it can easily be lost. This…

HOW TO OVERCOME YOURSELF

Dear friend,

The Phone Call

Date: 9th Oct 2016

I realised that I was emotionally disturbed. I wasn’t going mad, at least I hoped. Months of calm and all it took was one call to destroy it all. One call on this day shattered me. It made me feel that at the core, I was a disappointment. I had let down my…

How to be a better beta reader, and stop being an asshole.

Don’t be that person. You know, the one that just pisses everybody off.

What Do You Do When Your Heart Can’t Break Anymore?

Being comfortable with settling means you’ve given up on the possibility that things will change.

The Gray Area

Nothing usually happens on a Wednesday night, so why did I believe tonight would be any different? As the voices on the TV drown further and further out, my hand reaches for my phone as I unlock my screen with my thumb. I gaze at the array of unsaved numbers on my messages screen, until I scroll far…

5 Practical Tips for a Joyous Life from St. Francis

Start doing what’s necessary; then do what’s…

Resilience: Fully Embrace Your Past to Be Free

A lot has been said about resilience and how some people can get over traumatic events more easily than others. In short, resilience is the capacity to become stronger and recover quickly after difficult times and events. For me, resilience is the…

Laughter might not be the best medicine, but it sure is “Free”

This is such a hard concept to nail down.

History is filled with the “right” people who over time get so caught up in what they came to think was so certain to be correct that they ended up inflicting a lot of pain on others.

Good post, Darius. I had a reader last week who wrote: “And so it goes. Hemingway won a Nobel Prize for literature and nobody’s heard of you.” I wrote back saying that Hemingway wasn’t an overnight success and there are proportionately way more writers today than back in Paps’s day. I ended by saying “You should read Carlos Baker’s biography of…

Learning to love your mistakes

In the last six months, I’ve made some of the best and worst decisions in my life. I’ve grown so much as…

Masters of Discomfort

Overcoming those pesky everyday urges…

Paths

We walked the Red Trail yesterday to see the mischief all the rain we have been getting has done. The dike holding the pond was good so we enjoyed…

When do you give up on what you love?

It is indeed scary to jump off one ladder and then climb a completely new one. And very risky.

An expat repatriates: I want to move back to London

The best time management tool ever — a secret marketing experts do not know

Oh, FFS!

Going to talk about some trans stuff, so…. yeah

OK, quick bit of background:
I’m looking into surgery, which is no real surprise, most trans women do at one time or another. And almost everyone gets horrified at the bill.
Surgery is no small thing and, unless you’re lucky enough to…

My Tribute To Col. Bruce Hampton

How do you pay tribute to your best friend, who was more your brother in spirit than physical birth…

In the shadows with joy

Written by Gillian Fox.

The Career of Awakening

It’s our job to follow our aliveness.

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”

Café, Lego e seu sonho.

Qual é a relação do café e do Lego com o seu sonho?

Thank you for writing this. I have not watched the series yet — neither has my teenage daughter…but we will. What I can say is that all the conversation about the book and series invited us to have an authentic conversation as does your article.

My daughter is aware that I had a difficult childhood and miserable experience…

What I learnt from chasing false hopes.

I’m 25 years old, and it’s too soon to start writing about life lessons, but I had my…

What makes a teacher so great

This is my personal experience with a teacher that had so much compassion and enthusiasm for her students that it moved us to tears.. and me the most. Especially on that graduation night where my class had to say goodbye to her.

#1 Reflection

I visit my Mum between nine and ten in the morning on weekends because that is the best time of day for her. Today, as I sit with her in the living room of her “unit” in the care home, I see a family with their mother, a new resident who just moved in. They settle her at the table and say goodbye, see you soon…

What’s the Point of Having a Job, Making Money?

Survival and reproduction articulate a circle.

Asking the Right Questions

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”

• Thomas Pynchon, novelist (1937-). “Gravity’s Rainbow”

3 Steps For Introducing Minimalism Into Your Life

500 days of rejection made me compensate my fears like this

Let’s get carried away by life, instead of all the time expecting so much

Imposter Syndrome: A Love Story

Dear Younger Me: Good lookin’ out for your future self.

Why You Should Stop Setting Goals and Start Creating Systems

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often…

Latest Son Birthday Poems

Birthday Poems for Son: Why depend on mushy quotes when you can compose your own particular sweet sonnet on your child’s birthday card? It’s not very difficult to make a delightful short rhyme that will end up being a token for a considerable length of time to come. Simply think…

Public Speaking: Four R’s to Remember

The Forrest Four-Cast: May 8, 2017

The Upside of Seventy

How Brains get Better with Age and my Journey into Art.

Winning When You Don’t Feel Like It

Crossing the finish line first doesn’t make you a winner. That’s just the time when you collect…

Prison Book Club: The Writer as Witness

Reading Harry Potter in Maximum Security, Week 6

4 Ways to Create Change Beyond Traditional Activism

1. Put yourself in the midst of people who inspire…

Cheating Death

In a bid to boost my morning prayer life, I said to myself few days ago that I needed to regard sleep as a temporary death from which I…

On Not Wasting Time, Staying On-track, and Finding Life Purpose

I wrote this in response to someone’s questions in a Reddit channel about discipline. What I’m going to say may not be agreeable to everyone, but it is what has helped me a lot in terms of motivating myself, staying on…

Kicking off summer with rest

“Your body cannot heal if it’s racing about.”

–Dr. Ann Webster, director of the renowned Mind Body Program for Cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Benson-Henry Institute.

Real talk

I’m going for a different approach with this blog. Instead, of one consistent theme, I’ll be taking you through all walks of life, from…

Work out those worries

Every now and then we feel lost and confused and feel a huge burden that we can’t get rid of. It happens irrespective…

VIBRATE TO SUCCESS

The simplest way to automatically play at a high level, in business, fitness, indeed any area of your life, is to re-calibrate yourself to where BEING at that level is your norm, and you don’t have to think about it.

When should you quit a book?

Now that you have decided to let it go.

Tightrope Vs Mud Walking

Poor as ever, but life is good.

Learning To Fly — Setting Yourself Free

I am extremely afraid of heights. That’s why standing on the edge of an airplane Saturday…

The Moments We Remember…

Thwump…

Thwump…

Thwack…

Pause

Pause.

That’s what I did last year. I paused taking on new culture clients to tend to things I’d been punting.

Pros and Cons

I sat across from her as she ate. Her fingers were slippery and shimmering in the late afternoon sun. She was tearing chicken away…

The Central Question of Life and How to Answer It

The answer is 42.

Just kidding. Have you ever wondered how you should spend your time?

Of course you have. Maybe you were so overwhelmed with a massive to-do list, you didn’t know where to…

When the future awaits

kind of topic that has never ending story for those who are still curious about how their lives going to be. the future itself has something that could empower people to become better. the future gives hope for those who surrendered facing a lot of obstacles in their lives. i disagree if…

The Great Secret.

As young kids and young adults we tend to grow up with the firm belief that we are invincible and can do anything without…