There’s one topic that can easily lead people away from happiness and joy and meaningfulness, and it’s definitely done so for me, is this word “freedom”. One of the most celebrated words in our culture, a word that sometimes seems to be used as something pretty close to happiness. Somehow, this idea of being free […]

A common complaint that I hear, and especially with people who are just starting out in self-development, is just feeling stuck, feeling like you want to make changes but simply don’t know where to begin. Just looking at the possibilities for how to make changes and accomplish great things, it just seems like a giant

What kind of character are you? What kind of story are you in? Because so much of how we picture the world, picture our lives, make meaning of things, seems to be through telling stories, fitting things into stories, it’s interesting to imagine our lives as stories that we’re part of. Imagine being in a

It’s another one of those paradoxical mindset tricks that sometimes the things that we’re dreading, the things that we’re really concerned about, that we hope don’t happen, just that feeling about them, that dread can in a way magnify them, so that we make them bigger and more likely to affect us in a strange

The modern world doesn’t care about what is going on inside us. It doesn’t care about how we feel. The world, the system we live in, this whole culture, this society, this economy, this whole machine that we operate within as the modern world: it is based on material things. It is based on things

One thing that can get in the way of making changes to our lives, doing new things, doing challenging things, going in new directions, is this feeling of wanting safety, wanting to have some kind of security. Anything that’s new and different and unknown is automatically, in some way, dangerous. In some way, it is

In my last video, I talked about having this feeling of wonder about the fact that the universe exists at all, and the fact that we get to exist and have this life. How can we trigger this feeling? How can we break out of this kind of sense of assuming that it’s all normal,

To me, it seems like one of the most basic emotions and perspectives on life that ties everything together is this sense of wonder. What is this universe that we’re in? What is this experience of having life? this is amazing. I just can’t believe that this whole thing exists. And we can look into

[…] I find one metaphor that works really well for personal management of life is thinking of yourself as a country. Imagine that you are your own country. […] I find this especially comes out when there’s kind of internal disagreement, when I feel conflicted inside. Maybe different parts of me want to do different

Like many people, I’ve certainly fallen into the trap of caring about too many things, having to have an opinion about too many things. Sometimes it seems like, through most of my life, if any topic was brought up, I would have to decide what my opinion was on it. I guess that’s what they