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Why I’m Joining the Maximizers
Maximize your sound … and everything else. I first became familiar with the term maximizer from Penelope Trunk’s blog. According to Trunk, a maximizer always wants the best, and spends a great deal of...
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What Makes a “Loser”?
I would never call anyone a loser. I don’t believe in character labels. People change, develop new habits, get better at life. That kind of psychological warfare (labeling people to belittle them, or...
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2015 Year-End Review
Momu Mobile Studio Unit — one of many 2015 highlights. This weekend I completed my first personal year-end review. Since I don’t have an employer, it’s up to me to evaluate my own performance and look...
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The System is the Result
Goals are useful. A goal points you in the direction you want to go, gives you a metric by which to measure progress, and ideally provides the motivation to get there. But goals don’t produce results....
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You Can’t Get There From Here (Get Better by Temporarily Getting Worse)
Into the valley. There is a cost to trying to maintain maximum fitness at all times. When navigating a fitness landscape, you often need to go down (into a valley) to reach a higher peak. Upgrading...
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Why We Love Conor McGregor (the Wonderful Insanity of Calling Your Shots)
Like many people I got pulled back into UFC because of Conor McGregor. I watched the first UFC fights in the nineties, on VHS tapes rented from my local video store. Ninjitsu vs. wrestling, karate vs....
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What Makes a Good Coach?
Photo by Carl R. Jr. I became interested in the topic of coaching after reading this excellent article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande, published in 2011. Gawande, a skilled and well-respected...
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How to Expand Your Cognitive Toolkit
In this video Stephen Fry calls himself an empiricist. I’m often entertained by Stephen Fry, and empiricism is probably the most useful system of thought invented by human beings to date, but calling...
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Success Will Break You (Until It Forges You)
Conor McGregor just threw a wrench in his own works (if you haven’t been following the drama, McGregor refused to show up for a press conference in Vegas, was cut from UFC 200, and subsequently...
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“Persistment” (My Take on “Grit”)
I like the psychological concept of grit, which corresponds roughly with perseverance, and even more closely with conscientiousness (one of the “Big Five” personality traits). Popularized most recently...
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Let Me Mansplain Male Power To You
Mane power. What gives men more power (more privilege, higher status, higher salaries) than women? Obviously that isn’t the case everywhere, all the time. There are plenty of situations,...
View ArticleHow To Reconcile Gratitude and Ambition (and a pitch for charity:water)
I focus a lot on gratitude. If I don’t, I’m a miserable ass. I’ve written before about how gratitude is my emotional force multiplier. I have so much to be grateful for. Good health, family, friends,...
View ArticleHow to Think About Your Career
It’s possible to have a career without really thinking about it. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve had at least three-and-a-half accidental careers so far. I started doing computer support and database...
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How To Prevent Stress Spirals
Supercell by Kelly DeLay Rough week, in a first-world-problems sort of way. Upgraded my Macbook Pro to a 1T internal SSD. Restoring from my SuperDuper backup didn’t work, so I had to install macOs...
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How To Be Less Racist
In the United States and Europe, racists are coming out of the woodwork, freely expressing views that were considered taboo only a year ago. Concerns about terrorism and economic security (some valid,...
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New 6-Week Experiment: Living With a Disability
On the evening of Dec. 9th I stepped off my skateboard the wrong way and broke my foot (three fractured metatarsals — see above). Thinking it was just a bad sprain, I took a Lyft home and rested on...
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Five Things That Made My Life 10% Better (Each)
Our new puppy, a possible #6? We’ll see! I used to make myself miserable in ways that turned out to be easily fixable. Sometimes it took ten, twenty years to see the obvious and do something about it....
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Activity Audit – Where Does All The Time Go?
At some point everything drops … December and January brought more freelance coding and database work than expected, but now I’m in a quiet stretch. It’s given me the opportunity to experiment with my...
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A Few Things I’ve Learned in My Forties
Getting older doesn’t automatically make you wiser, but there’s more experience to draw on. One theory suggests that this is why we appear to think more slowly as we age–the dataset is bigger but the...
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Problem List and 30-Day No Worrying Experiment
No worries. Over the past couple months I’ve been maintaining two new lists: My problems. Things I’m looking forward to. I update both on a weekly basis, along with progress towards my current goals....
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