Growth

Growth

On Challenge

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, March 6 2024

Everyone thinks they just want to live the easy life: being waited on hand and foot, eating junk food and playing video games all day, or living a life without work. People say they want that—no matter how much evidence you provide to the contrary: people who hit the lottery are often miserable or lose it all; animals sit around all day and eat...

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Growth

The Truth and Ethics of When Life Begins

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, February 7 2024

Note: This blog touches on a hugely controversial topic and is not meant to persuade anyone to change their minds but is rather meant to discuss the various factors in people's understanding of the issue and ethical/legal conclusions that they draw from said understanding. One of the seemingly toughest questions that is actually one of the...

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Growth

How Good Do You Want to Be? (How Much Do You Want to Grow?)

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, November 15 2023

One of the most important things in life is picking a direction and a destination. If growth is the point, then you need to determine what areas of your life you wish to improve and by how much. Since we all only have 24 hours per day, we have to choose how we spend that time to realize our dreams. In short, we need to determine how good we want...

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Growth

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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Planning

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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Planning

Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 30 2023

In the immortal words of Creed Bratton of The Office, “If I can’t SCUBA, then what has this all been about? What am I working toward?” While this is quotation is meant to be funny since a man working an office job (with plenty of references to drugs, murder, and other seedy activities during the workday) for decades was all leading up to a...

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Growth

Entropy and Life

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 16 2023

There 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...

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Meaning

Misconceptions about Growth-Oriented Meaning

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 12 2023

The idea that the meaning of life can be so simple and elegant is a tough one to digest; there’s a reason why people say, “What is the meaning of life?” as a joke when someone asks them to bring up a topic for light conversation. But if it’s that simple, then why do people ponder it so deeply and frequently? Well, the answer brings up many...

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Success

Life is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, June 28 2023

The haves vs. the have-nots. The majority vs. the minority. Good vs. evil. It seems like everything in life is turned into a conflict between two forces where one has to win and the other has to lose. Unfortunately, this taps into deep human psychology regarding everything from our fight-or-flight response to our tendency toward tribalism to feel...

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Emotions

Constructive vs. Unconstructive Caring

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, June 7 2023

I wrote in my previous post about how people focus more on screaming for others to change than thinking about things that they can do. There’s no doubt that most people care about issues—even though many are either pretending or grossly exaggerating their concern (The Office poked fun at this well when Ryan falsely professed his deep love for...

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