Category: Stress
The Value of Stepping Away
Stepping away from your projects from time to time can give you new perspective and new insights. After trying to focus on increasing the number of photos I was taking for a couple months, I stepped away from my photography. When I went back to review my pictures, I was surprised to see some of…
Distraction Depression and Regaining Focus
Our focus is one of the “necessary but not sufficient” attributes of a productive life. Focus by itself won’t make you successful, but not being able to focus guarantees that you will never be successful. Unfortunately for you, me and nearly everyone we know, that our attention is under constant assault. The results are predictably…
You Set the Tone
In Daniel Coyle’s book the Culture Code he has a chapter called “The Good Apples.”It’s about how an academic experiment was disrupted by some “good apples” – people who were committed to keeping the emotional tone of a meeting in a functional, productive, enjoyable place. You see the goal of this experiment was to see…
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…
Sparked By Work
There are a lot of personality and work aptitude tests out there, which makes sense. Westerners work a ton, we look to work for a sense of community, accomplishment and self-realization.Stories of work frustration and difficulty which are then overcome and lead to triumphant work self-realization are extremely attractive to us (cue Joseph Campbell’s Hero…
The Incompetent Expat
The expat life is one of high-churn relationships and circumstances. The harsh reality is that a lot of people don’t stay long, they repatriate or move on. Stress, frustration, health and changes in circumstances create a permanent state of flux for a lot of expats. Divorces are frequent, and depression can be pretty common. So…
When Tools Become Masters
A calendar is an incredibly useful tool to organize your time and understand what you’re going to be doing. Truth be known, I need to use my calendar more. But when your calendar controls what you can do, prevents you from taking risks, or doing the things you love because every free moment has been…