Progress in all areas of Life?
When you start thinking about the areas of your life that you want to progress in, there are a lot of areas you can consider. There are too many in fact, and trying to set goals in all of them make you unlikely to make any real progress. Instead, think of where your best return…
Efficiency Is Good But First Vision
Efficiency aficionados love the idea of squeezing a little bit more out of every hour. Adding just a little bit more efficiency to every day. Getting 1% better. Fine-tuning the habits, stacking, sorting, and refolding them. It becomes an endless cycling of refinement and tweaks, trying to get the perfectly efficient day. The problem arises…
Starting to Think About Investing and Retirement
So you’re starting to think about investing and retirement – well, I hope you’re ready for a lot of confusing lingo, math formulas with lots of Greek symbols, and a healthy pile of shame (why did you wait soooo long to start to invest, and also at the same time, who do you think you…
Find Yourself an Expat Mentor or Coach
Finding a mentor or coach as an expat is a tricky process. Generally you don’t know a ton of other expats, and those who you do find often are at very different life stages from you and most are quite busy. So you end up trying to figure out a lot of life through trial…
Finding Your Blind Spots
We all have strengths and weaknesses, and one of the weaknesses that we all tend to have is that we don’t know what our weakness is. That’s the worst part. It’s like a form of mental color-blindness. People can tell you that your clothes don’t match, but then you look in the mirror, and conclude…
The Twenty Questions Challenge
As a kid growing up road trips were long periods of silence, interrupted by sibling bickering of course, and playing games. One game was twenty questions, also known as “Animal, Mineral, Vegetable” or “Person, Place or Thing”. The goal is to guess what someone is thinking of asking only yes / no questions. It was…
Responses to Dangerous Abundance
The best response to an environment of dangerous abundance is to move in a way that is contrary to the normal behaviors seen in that environment. This is a form of scarcity which drives up value. Scarcity compounds, meaning that the when people realize something is rare, and therefore valuable, they scramble to snatch it…
Living in Dangerous Abundance
We seem to be physiologically wired for danger, difficulty and adversity. And we seem to be emotionally hardwired for community. We also seem to be spiritually hardwired for a connection to the supernatural. But we also have this inclination to adapt to our circumstances, and to assume that life will continue along its normal path…
Avoiding Expat Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization is the idea that a person can keep conflicting ideas, values even personalities in their lives simultaneously. They have a personality at home that is wildly different from their personality at the workplace. With their close friends they are warm and generous, in business they are ruthless…
New Vision New Perspective New Opportunities
When you’re feeling stuck or frustrated in your life, work or relationships, one of the most difficult things to do is regain vision and perspective and see the new opportunities before you. The challenge is that we’re too close to the issue, to emotionally invested to make decisions rationally…
Discovering Keystone Habits
I love the concept of leverage. The idea that there are tools, technologies and techniques that we can use to have a disproportion impact is really fascinating to me. That’s part of the beauty of ideas, and paradigm shifts. A single idea can upset the entirety of societal order. A single paradigm shift can transform…
Sticky Habits
When people decide to be more intentional in their lives they often fall into the trap of trying to live someone else’s life. They decide that they want read books that literate people read, workout like fitness experts, eat like Mediterranean long-livers, or pick up the morning routine of Tim Cook. They want the meditation…
Where did your Habits come from?
We are all creatures of habit. We can’t help it, it’s quite literally built into the biological structure of our brains. That’s either great news, or it’s just depressing. You need habits. Per Inc, adults make about 35,000 choices a day. That’s about 36 choices a minute for every hour you’re awake (assuming 8 hours…
Undervalued Art of Reframing
Reframing is the idea that we can take an experience, and give it a new context that allows for dramatically different perception of that experience. For example, telling students that they must get rid of all the stress they feel before a test or they’re sure to do poorly, verses telling a group of students…
Seneca on Time
Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher and statesman, certainly had a way with words and a gift of observation. I like to imagine that he was the Mark Twain or Seth Godin of his day. Wry, shrewd, succinct. I’d love to take a writing class from a guy like this, or even a thinking class…