What Underlies Bad Habits

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, November 8 2023

There are two famous books, The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits, that go into detail around how to break or change a habit. This won’t be a rehash of those books, though I do recommend reading them if you’re interested in how habits are formed and how they stick. All that is needed to know for this post is that a habit involves a trigger that...

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Finding What You Want through What You Don’t Want

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, November 1 2023

You know that one person who always drives you nuts: they say that they don’t care where they go out to dinner, and then when you suggest a series of several places, they nix every single one. Similarly, it’s a famous stereotype that women won’t order their own French fries but will immediately eat some off of someone else’s plate when his or her...

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What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, October 25 2023

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It seems like a simple, innocent question. Asking a child this question is either just to make conversation, to get to know them, or to understand what they want to do so you can keep it in mind for where/when you can help them in the future. No matter what the reason, the result is straightforward:...

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Listening to vs. Following Your Emotions

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, October 18 2023

Roger Ebert (the movie critic) famously said, “Your emotions will never lie to you.” In an amusing coincidence, there are plenty of movies that talk about trusting your feelings and going with your gut. Star Wars, detective stories, and romantic comedies offer plenty of examples of tapping into your instincts or gut feelings to make the right...

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Unlimited Desires and Scarce Resources

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, October 11 2023

In my previous post, I wrote about how you will always want things no matter how much you try to suppress or squelch your desires. I’m now flipping the topic: are those desires unlimited, and how do they stack up against the ability to satisfy them? The technical definition of Economics is the study of the production and consumption of goods and...

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Belief Is the Difference Between Excitement and Longing

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, October 4 2023

I’ve written a lot about my beef with The Four Noble Truths, which is famously translated into English to communicate that life is suffering and the cause of all suffering is desire. It goes on to explain that if you detach from that desire—and, ideally, from all desire—you will let go of that suffering and reach a state of peace. Now, apologists...

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The Magic of the ‘How’ in Life

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 27 2023

Most people focus on the “why” in life as the big questions—mainly because they feel more personal, more subjective, and more unanswerable and so they can be analyzed for a lifetime. But “how” questions are just as interesting, just in a different way and susceptible to the human arc of

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Defining and Improving Your “Life Architecture”

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 20 2023

One of my first ever blog posts was about creating a “life architecture roadmap”—in other words, assessing the current state of your life and identifying your desired future state so that you could create a roadmap filled with practical next steps and milestones to get there. The idea is a play on Enterprise Architecture, a discipline in which...

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Something to Live for

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 13 2023

One of my favorite psychology studies of all time is the one where they give the test group a plant to take care of in their elderly home and then provide a plant for the control group that is taken care of by a staff member. The results were stark: the group who had the responsibility for taking care of the plant lived much, much longer than the...

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You Can Find Meaning in Whatever Happens to You

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 6 2023

Meaning is subjective; as such, you can decide that something has significance to you or decide that everything is stupid and meaningless. While this sounds like nothing in life really matters, it’s actually more positive than that. The best takeaway for your mental health and well-being is that you can take anything your life, find its meaning...

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