One of the all-time great movie quotes comes from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." I use this quote or my personal variation ("Just because I can do it doesn't mean I should do it...") frequently because when you are a highly capable human being,...
Read MoreThere 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...
Read MoreYou 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...
Read MoreMeaning 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...
Read MoreThere is a long list of questions that people ask that show a genuine misunderstanding of how life exists in the universe—or, if they do understand it, an unwillingness to accept this law of physics. Questions include: The most common manifestation of this in modern times is when people look around, see someone better off than them, and then...
Read MoreThere’s a saying, “It’s always in the last place you look.” I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who quickly retorted something along the lines of, “Of course it is; if you kept looking in more places after you found what you were looking for, you’d be a crazy person.” Obviously, the joke is in the double-meaning of “last place you look”—meaning both...
Read MoreMagicians (also known as illusionists) are masters of manipulation of your attention. Anyone who has seen Penn and Teller’s act has been introduced to the science behind how they deceive you: they can make an object appear to have moved when it hasn’t; they can make it appear to be somewhere when it has actually moved; and they can make you focus...
Read MoreWhen I was in college, I had a Health professor tell me that he used to like salt and then had to quit for his blood pressure. He quit it for three weeks and afterwards didn’t mind the unsalted taste and even couldn’t add salt anymore because he could taste it and didn’t really need it. He then said that if you wanted a habit to stick, you can...
Read MoreYou have probably heard of the famous phrase, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” Turning that into a formula, it would be: Luck = Preparation + Opportunity So what does that mean, and how can you actually create your own luck? Let’s take a look. Let’s start with what it means. Luck typically refers to random chance. Will it rain...
Read MoreResolving conflicts has never been easy, but it feels like in a world where you can live in your own world that you never have to talk to someone who ever disagrees with you. Even debates are no longer really two people having a conversation to try to influence each other but rather each person talking to an audience to score points and "own" the...
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