We can imagine that Marcus Aurelius was a busy man, perhaps the busiest man in the world. He had 14 children. He was living through a pandemic. He had a nagging stomach ailment. He was taking philosophy classes.
Oh, and he was the emperor of Rome. His domain stretched some 2.2 million square miles and included some 120 million people for whom he was both responsible for and in charge of.
How did he manage it all? How did he get it all done? Without losing his mind? Without falling behind?
We know that one question played a huge role.
Imagine this: You’ve been diagnosed with a rare and serious disease. In hopes of keeping you alive, the doctor recommends a new, experimental course of treatment. It works for some people — maybe 60%. But it’s covered by your insurance, and if you are in the 60%, you’ll be successfully cured in six months. What do you do?
Of course you say yes. Maybe you’ll get unlucky and it won’t work for you, but it’s worth a try. You’d probably try the treatment even with only a 10% success rate. …
I recently wrote a pilot TV script with a girlfriend of mine. Neither of us had ever done anything like this before. As I sent out the draft to a few trusted friends, I was about to type: “Do you think this is any good?”
But I stopped myself. Instead, I wrote, “Can you please help us make this better?”
I’m a seasoned entrepreneur and a novice writer. I’m learning that the same rules apply to both roles. Whether I’m crafting a script or a business plan, it’s up to me to decide when it is “good enough” for the…
As vaccination rates increase, we’re getting closer to a future where masks are less of a presence in our lives, and our smiles (and non-smiles) will once again be visible to friends, co-workers, and the strangers we pass on the sidewalk and in the grocery store.
If that sentence didn’t make you smile, please keep reading.
Until I looked into smiling while researching my book Works Well With Others, I didn’t realize how powerful a force it is. The simple act of smiling can change you and everyone around you, and that’s true now more than ever. A smile —…
Tell me if this rings a bell: After a long, long, long stretch of pandemic sameness, you finally have something on the calendar that has you looking forward — maybe a date with a friend you haven’t seen in forever, or a weekend day trip, or just a coveted afternoon alone, away from the people you’ve been cooped up with. You’re excited. You’re eager. You’re ready. And then, suddenly, it’s here and then over — and by the time the next week is out, you can barely remember how great you felt.
It’s natural. We have a tendency to tear…
Heading into the final stretch of the women’s snowboard cross race at the 2006 Winter Olympics, American Lindsey Jacobellis held a commanding lead over her competitors. As she ascended the second-to-last jump, Jacobellis looked back to confirm her lead, flew into the air, then grabbed her board in a celebratory display of swagger. The showboating would have been no big deal except that when she landed, Jacobellis fell on her backside while Tanja Frieden of Switzerland zoomed past to win the gold medal.
This kind of showy blunder happens all the time in sports. NFL players DeSean Jackson and Danny…
The best conversations crack us open. They leave us tender and reeling, alive again with possibility, mesmerized by the uncanny nature of things. When you really “get there” with someone, you reach what my friend once referred to as the wilderness. You may not know where you are anymore, but you know it’s a place of mystery and beauty. You know you want to keep going. I felt this most acutely a few years ago when I kept having unexpected interactions with strangers. I wrote a book about those experiences — No One You Know, which is very much a…
💡 Today’s tip: If you’re bored with something, stop doing it.
Say you’re working on something that is boring you to tears. What do you do? Push through anyway? Philosopher Eve Bigaj writes on Medium that we should actually listen to our boredom, noting that boredom can be a guide. As Bigaj writes, when we’re bored with something, whether that’s a creative project or something we’re reading or an assignment at work, that boredom is trying to tell us something. “It’s almost a moral compass. It’s what tells me that I have lost my ‘why.’ …
📂 Today’s tip: Use your Drafts folder.
Here’s the task-prioritization hack to try when you’re tired of to-do lists and calendars. Jason Chatfield writes on Medium that this is a trick that works “100% of the millionty zillion times I’ve done it”: At the start of the week, write out, or at least start, the main emails that you have to write. You can also just start an email with the subject line reflecting something that needs to get done that week. (For example: “Touching base with Jason about Project Z’s deliverables.”) …
😋 Today’s tip: Treat yourself to a favorite spread at the store.
Have you ever been transported to a happy memory just by taking a bite of something delicious? Medium iOS engineer Alaina Kafkes has: She writes on Medium about remembering the transcendent deliciousness of a bagel with peanut butter she once had before a bike ride. Something about that snack at that moment caused her to “experience the utter joy of finding quintessence in the quotidian.” She goes on to write about all the different nut butters she’s enjoyed over the years, noting, “what I like most about these…
