Ideas are free, execution is priceless.
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How do you calibrate what you think are your needs?
Here’s a cool paradox. For certain things, we don’t need as much as we think we do. And for other things, we need much more than we think we do. Take the concept of time. The story we’ve told ourselves is that if we only had a few more hours in the day or one extra day in the week, we’d cross off everything on our list. But time,…
What will work best for me right now, regardless of what has worked before?
Response flexibility is the habit that enables us put a temporal and mental space between stimulus and response, and between impulse and action. Siegel’s research showed that widening our window of tolerance is what broadens the span of arousal within which we can function adaptively. Think of it as the clinical version of the best mindfulness advice our parents and teachers ever gave us. Sweetheart, take a breath. Now,…
It drags us down into hell right next to them
Who has let you down in the past month? Maybe it was a friend who bailed on the concert at the last minute. Or a coworker who didn’t meet your project deadline. Perhaps a public figure who accidentally said something offensive during a press conference. Or maybe the barista at the coffee shop put the wrong kind of milk in your drink. The list goes on and on. There…
Have a frontier, not a career
Whyte, the poet master general, explained that his work is only a career looking back. Looking forward, it’s a frontier, he says. He just tries to keep an integrity and groundedness, while keeping his eyes on his voice dedicated towards the horizon. This sounds eerily familiar to me. My professional life resembles that trajectory as well. It’s like, one day you look around and realize that your current mix…
It’s not a habit we decide, but a place we arrive
The most rewarding thing we can do is update our definition of humility. We accept that it’s not a strategy, program, goal, posture or technique. It’s not something we try to be. Nobody wakes up in the morning and just resolves to be humbler. We can’t slip on humility like a pair of wool socks. We can’t whip or will ourselves into a state of modesty like an ascetic…