[…] 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

There are a lot of videos out there with names like “Cure your depression in 5 minutes”, “The secret to a happy life revealed”, “Seven happiness hacks”. And these are so good at baiting those clicks, because wow, I want to know. […] I mean, if it was really possible to have happiness solved in

[…] Anybody who is living by selflessness, who wants to always be helpful for other people, who is so focused on in any way being useful and valuable to other people: this is just a target for being exploited. People will take advantage, get free help. “Hey, can you help me?” “Hey, I could use

[…] What if you don’t actually need anything? What if you don’t need to have good results at all? What if you don’t need to receive anything? What if you don’t need to even become anything, you don’t need to gain anything, simply needing nothing at all? Imagine if your efforts were entirely dedicated to

A concept I keep seeing coming up in self-development is this delay effect, where we can work really hard on something, put in a lot of effort, and then we notice absolutely no change. Everything just seems to plateau, seems to be going nowhere, and then suddenly, at some point, you wake up and feel

[…] This whole idea of minimalism, this whole movement, is about simplifying our lives by removing some of that stuff. But there’s just so much stuff, and it seems like most people, they can’t even list all the things that are filling their lives. Can you make a list of everything in your life? It

So when we’re starting something new, it’s usually because we feel like it. There’s some reason that drives us to do something. It feels good. We feel this kind of positive feedback loop as we do something more and more, and we get a good reaction, we get good results from doing it, and so

It seems like we make decisions all the time based on feelings, and why not? Go with your gut: we can learn so much from the feelings, the intuitions that come up, that sometimes seem to know more than we know. Because we can only compute logically to a certain degree within certain known parameters,

It seems like a big obstacle to self-development for many people, an obstacle to getting started, is some idea of just not being ready, of being too weak, too lacking in willpower, unable to get things started. So I think it’s very helpful to always remember that it’s OK to start from zero, from absolute