I talked about how it can be almost dangerous, in a way, to think about life too much like a story, because the things that happen to us, events in the real world are not laid on us like a carefully designed, orchestrated, prepared story made by a storyteller. At least as far as any […]

One of the benefits that I’m finding about having my life become more simple and more organized is that the things that I have, and the routines that I have, my home and my possessions, they’re starting to really feel like this is a tool. This is a tool that I can control and use

As part of this whole idea of making decisions with incomplete information, choosing what to do even though we really don’t know what’s going on: that’s something that’s been very helpful for me in self-development, in improving my life. Because, you know, when I’m in a bad mental state, you really can’t see the big

One of those life skills that seems to be very useful, and I’ve been slow to learn, is this idea of making decisions with incomplete information. It seems like so much of what we have to decide in life is what we really don’t know what the full picture is. So we have to, time

One of the basic challenges of self-development, self-improvement, is that so many of the things that we know are good for us are really kind of boring, at least compared to so many of the things that we know are bad for us, that are often very fun. After all, the things that are bad

It seems like there’s always a danger of life sliding into predictability. No matter how much we know that things change over time, and you know, we’re not in the same position we were last year, certainly the world isn’t, and we kind of know that things are always changing, but it just seems like,

A little trick that I’ve been enjoying thinking about, that I’ve found helpful, is this idea of kind of taking on a character. You know, if I’m finding that I’m having trouble behaving in the way that I want to behave, then I can sort of imagine a character who would do the things that

Anybody who is not a perfect master of self-discipline knows that sometimes you just don’t feel like doing what you know you should do. And what does that really mean? What’s that all about? You just- I mean, you know what is the best thing to do, and yet there’s some part of you that

I have a generally low opinion of any kind of professional critics, professional art reviewers, who will look at some kind of piece of art and then judge whether they consider it to be good or not. And of course, nothing wrong with an opinion. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with what they say. My

You know, so many of us, it seems like so much of our mental world, the way that we experience the world, is influenced by stories. We have all these stories, especially movies, TV, books, we have all these great stories that, you know, people really get into, and we fill our minds with all