Have you ever asked yourself if your stress is a real thing? I’ve been a doctor for over 30 years, and I’ve never seen stress appear on a blood test or under a microscope because it has no physical form. You can’t weigh it, scan it, or generally prescribe something to take it away. Stress…
You have a limited number of good decisions in you each day. After that, the quality of your decisions starts to suffer, and the dangerous thing is you won’t always notice it happening until after you’ve already made those bad choices. That’s the nature of decision fatigue: it degrades your thinking precisely when your thinking…
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you don’t find yourself, you create yourself, and that takes effort, direction, and time. Not just a summer, not just a sabbatical, it takes years of consistent, deliberate work pointed in a direction that matters to you. The person you want to become isn’t waiting to be discovered somewhere on a…
Your network isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure. Think about your phone. If you were the only person in the world with one, it would be worthless. Two phones and you can call each other, assuming you get along. Five phones and there are ten possible connections between them. Twenty phones and you’re looking at 190…
Some people believe luck is a mystical force, a kind of invisible favour that gets distributed to the chosen few and withheld from everyone else. An explanation for why some people seem to have everything handed to them while you’re left grinding away with nothing to show for it. I understand the appeal of that…
This article is about conditions of worth — a term coined by the psychologist Carl Rogers for something most of us carry without ever naming it: the terms other people set, usually without meaning to, for when we’re allowed to feel good about ourselves. Rogers’ idea, from his 1959 theory of personality, is that from…
The simple way of thinking about the law of diminishing returns is what happens when you reach the point where the effort you’re putting in is no longer worth what you’re getting out. Sometimes in life you just keep going, grinding way beyond that point, and you need to stop and ask yourself an honest…
“Try to pose for yourself this task, not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Dostoevsky wrote that in 1863, and whether it be polar bears or purple elephants, often when we don’t want to think of something the reverse happens and…
Feedback is said to be the food of champions. It’s a key to successful practice and an essential part of how any learner actually improves, that’s why higher level performers in almost any field actively look for feedback. Not because they enjoy being told what’s wrong with them, but because they’ve worked out that without…
We talked about failure in the last chapter, this lesson is about the other F word and that is Fear. Fear is that primitive, hardwired drive that’s been keeping humans alive since before we had language to describe it. Fear is one of the most powerful emotions you have. It sharpens your senses, floods your…