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If someone asked me to prove my undying love for my daughter, I would tell him that I have pretended to be over fifty different Pokémon characters. I have watched an entire Pokémon Advanced Battle DVD, which is essentially like roasting your soul on a spit...
Lately, though, perhaps because at age 41 I'd begun feeling less like the captain of my life and more like its deckhand, I'd started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one—a person who encapsulates everything you've ever dreamed of becoming. Let's call him your Cooler Self. All those dreams that got lost along the way, the ones that were casualties of chance or duty or cowardice: There's a "you" out there—a mountain climber or war photographer or race-car driver—who brought them to fruition...
"Still, I can't help thinking what else I might have accomplished if I hadn't had children. Like I'm wasting my talent or something."
"There's always something else you could be doing," he said. "We're wasting a life as we speak."...
There's a reason we drift toward attachment, I think, as we get older— attachment to people, to work, to things. As death moves closer, we try our hardest to dig in. We pound in the stakes so that our tents don't blow away. Still, it makes sense to me that the perceptions we once had of ourselves would be hard to cast off. We miss our youth, our freedom—which is not the same thing as wanting it back. We may think it is, but it's not...
When I got home, my daughter was still awake, and I kissed her good night and sat on her bed longer than usual. I told her a story from my childhood, one of her favorites, and she corrected me when I got a detail wrong. She knew the story better than I did. Miniature plastic planets hung from her ceiling, meant to mimic the geography of the solar system. A few of them—like Saturn—had fallen off, but the earth still dangled above us, hanging literally by a thread. If someone told me I was going to die tomorrow, I thought, I would still want to be sitting right here. Because it was going to happen someday—very soon, in fact, in cosmological time—and it mattered immensely where I was. There was no time not to waste.

life freedom ambition youth age time wp

But holes are interesting things. As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes. Pleasure, love, compassion, fulfillment; these things do not leak out of holes of any size. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.
This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: The facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things which ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

happiness loss sorrow life wp

You will never feel like you know what you are doing, so don’t wait for it.
Outside of your small circle of family and close friends, no one cares what you wear, what you do, what you read, or what you watch. This can be both liberating and terrifying. Choose liberating.
The more you enjoyed your time here, the more the memory of it will sting.
It is easy to make decisions about your life without even knowing you are making them. You will regret the decisions you did not make a hell of a lot more than the decisions you knew you were making.
What you will turn out to be will probably not bear much resemblance to what you thought you would be. Try not to mourn this overmuch.
The small patch of understanding and meaning you can create for yourself will be the anchor of your happiness. Grow and guard it.

commencement speech life wp

Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first...
The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something...
It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably...
Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.

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Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I've been thinking about what I've learned during the past six decades that really matters.
(A great list!)

leadership management lessons life hbr tony_schwartz wp

The thing is, that these lies, these distortions, these fabrications, these untruths don’t make for a better story. They make for an easier one, a story with fewer thorns to swallow on the way down, a less complicated story...
Maybe I’m just suspicious of these “better” stories because to me, the best stories are the most complicated ones, the ones that refuse to resolve in easy ways. Those are the stories that are most true because resolution is something that always remains just beyond our grasp.
It would be a comforting story, an easy story to think that what ails these men is some kind of pathology unique to them, runaway egos, rooted in childhood psychic damage maybe. But who hasn't told a lie to look a little bigger, a smidge more important, to see the impressed looks in someone else's eyes...
Let us also acknowledge the rationale that we tell these lies in service of some greater truth is also complete and utter bullshit. Mike Daisey and Greg Mortenson and John D’Agata and James Frey, and me will tell you that we tell the lie not to enrich ourselves, or for reasons of self-preservation, but because, in the words of Daisey, we “want to make people care.”
This is convenient, and maybe we even believe it, but that doesn’t make it true. It would even be handy to blame these lies on simple greed. Mortenson and Frey have profited to the tune of millions. It’s possible Daisey is approaching that.
But I think there’s a deeper truth here, a motivation that extends beyond the transparent B.S. that these lies are in the service of a higher calling.
What these lies invariably do to the stories is take the focus off the story itself, and place it on the storyteller...

life morals morality lies lying wp

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine — eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days. Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer. Indeed, when I am asked for writing advice, which is rare, I offer this: Get a good day job, one that you love, preferably one that consumes you and that puts your boat out in the river of life. Then be passionate about it, give it your all, get good at what you do. All that gives you plenty to write about, and it also takes the pressure off the writing. Counting on writing to pay the mortgage or your kid’s college tuition is decidedly risky...
The current obsession for parents to be everything to their children, from purveyor of Mozart in utero to muse, coach, camp counselor and chauffeur to as many enriching activities as one can afford ultimately produces parents who accomplish too little at work. I wonder if it produces children who are more accomplished than the parents who had none of these things...
What remains, then, is the time that belongs to sleep. And it is most often from that cache that I must steal. It’s not a happy or ideal arrangement; I have as much need for sleep as the next person. I wake up wanting more sleep, and even on days when I plan to catch up on my deficit and go to sleep early, a novel or something else keeps me reading past the 15 minutes I allow myself.

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the ways of men are incomprehensible until you see that they are striving for eternal life. This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts...
The reason why we need such comforting stories is simple. Even though the desire for immortality can sound fanciful and metaphysical, it is in fact rooted in our most basic biological nature. We are, as Richard Dawkins puts it, “survival machines”. Like all creatures, we are only here because our ancestors strove to survive and reproduce – to propel themselves into the future. This is a truism in today’s life sciences: the preservation and reproduction of self in some form belong to all definitions of what life is; it is what makes the difference between evolution’s winners and losers.
But in humans this will to live becomes the will to live for ever. It is a consequence of our overgrown brains, with our ability to project into the future. Our desire to avoid death is not limited to face-to-face confrontations with predators or precipices – we can use our powerful imaginations to summon the prospect of all sorts of mortal perils at any moment. And, of course, we can see that the universal processes of disease and degeneration will eventually claim us too. Thus we alone of creatures must live with the fact of mortality; this is what WB Yeats meant when he wrote that “Man has created death”.
So we are born with the same desire to keep going that marks all living things, yet we can see that this desire will one day be thwarted. This realisation is potentially devastating: we must live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen to us one day surely will. Extinction – the ultimate trauma, a personal apocalypse, the end of our individual universe – seems inevitable.
And thus we create our immortality strategies to cope with this terrifying insight. These strategies come in countless colours and creeds, from pyramid-building to yoga, from the Eucharist to cryonics, from the self-elevation of eternal fame to the self-submission of tribal loyalty. All human cultures have some way of reassuring us that death is not so bad as it seems

life immortality psychology wp

1) Understand that a “immutable” budget can be a trap door (Mistake #1)
2) In business, it’s always the content that matters – don’t hide it in a “pretty” format (Mistake #2)
3) Experts don’t “know” everything (Mistake #3)
4) “No News Is Good News” doesn’t apply in business (Mistake #4)
5) Fear poisons everything, and robs your common sense. Conquer it, or suffer the consequences (Mistake #5)

mistakes career business life lessons wp

Their reward is in the work itself, in the satisfaction both in the good result for the end user and in the private fulfillment that focused, detailed work with consequence can provide. Though I've only focused on a few members of this club, in my research I found again and again these same unique traits in other Invisibles, and I've been humbled by them. Meticulousness, savoring great responsibility, and seeking only internal satisfaction are a trifecta of traits—a near antithesis of our societal ethos of insouciant attention-cravers—as a culture we'd all do well to follow.
When we read a respected magazine, though we may disagree with the angle of a piece, we rarely think of the veracity of the facts. And that's one of the reasons great magazine journalism can be so enjoyable—we're able to read it and enjoy it with our lie-detector, if not turned off, then at least turned way down (the errant Stephen Glass or John D'Agata be damned). Dr. Feaster noted that the reason we rarely think of the anesthesiologist is "because as a specialty we've been so focused and successful at making anesthesia safe." It's The Invisibles' own success that keeps them invisible. So the next time you go to the philharmonic, think of the piano tuner. If you marvel at a Gehry building, think of the engineer who figured out how to keep it standing. Send a fruit basket to your anesthesiologist. And when you read a great magazine article, take a moment and think of the fact checker.

atlantic profession life wp

Everyone knows a business needs profits, customers, and ethics. What not everyone knows is which of those should come first, second, and third. A lot of companies fail because they get the sequence wrong...
Ethics, customers, profit. Don't forget that...
employees do best when they are led, not managed. When employees are asked for their advice, rather than being told what to do, they bring their best efforts, talents, and abilities to the table...
to be fully engaged, people need to know where the company is going. Everyone needs to be aligned around a goal that makes sense.

success hbr life business wp

(Comment: One of the best posts on Goal-setting I have read in a long long while!)
My 1999 goals are still taped on the wall. They remind me of what can I can accomplish when I get really clear about my priorities. Here’s what I learned about goals:
Write your goals down.
Put your goals somewhere visible, where you’ll see them everyday.
Don’t keep your goals a secret.
You have to really want it.
Goals need to be connected to a larger purpose that shows why they are important, and helps answer the question “What’s next” once they are achieved.
Carry your goals over to the next year to create a sense of flow.
Goal setting is not always a logical process.

goals goal_setting ambition life wp

Prioritizing requires reflection, reflection takes time, and many of the executives I meet are so busy racing just to keep up they don't believe they have time to stop and think about much of anything.
Too often — and masochistically — they default to "yes." Saying yes to requests feels safer, avoids conflict and takes less time than pausing to decide whether or not the request is truly important.
Truth be told, there's also an adrenaline rush in saying yes. Many of us have become addicted, unwittingly, to the speed of our lives — the adrenalin high of constant busyness. We mistake activity for productivity, more for better, and we ask ourselves "What's next?" far more often than we do "Why this?" But as Gandhi put it, "A 'no' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."
Saying no, thoughtfully, may be the most undervalued capacity of our times. In a world of relentless demands and infinite options, it behooves us to prioritize the tasks that add the most value. That also means deciding what to do less of, or to stop doing altogether.
Making these choices requires that we regularly step back from the madding crowd. It's only when we pause — when we say no to the next urgent demand or seductive source of instant gratification — that we give ourselves the space to reflect on, metabolize, assess, and make sense of what we've just experienced.
Taking time also allows us to collect ourselves, refuel and renew, and make conscious course corrections that ultimately save us time when we plunge back into the fray.

life hbr priorities practices slow

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

lists note worry life parenthood wp

Life VC Overwhelmed

Life Thoughts Fight

Productivity Life Purpose GTD inspiration

A great could-be-commencement lecture by PJ O'Rourke

PJO'Rourke commencement life advice humor

From "Things I have learned in my life so far"

Life learning time

Scott Berkun looks back on his 4 years as a freelancer after leaving Microsoft. Powerful lessons!

business Life advice tips Career freelance work