Success

Planning

Writing Your Life Résumé

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, May 10 2023

I've spoken before about how HR departments cracked the meaning of life and success by optimizing professional growth within their organizations. In there, I linked to the life résumé template for folks to create their own. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about when, how, and why you should create your own "life résumé" to plan your own...

Read More
Success

Create Your Own Luck

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, March 29 2023

You 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 More
Growth

Push Yourself and Rest; Don’t Hurt or Coddle Yourself

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, March 22 2023

We live in an interesting time. For billions of years, life evolved by searching endlessly for resources, using those resources to grow and reproduce, and then dying. And, at its core, that’s what humans still do today. But the past few centuries have seen great advances in humans’ ability to require less effort to survive and to reduce the risk...

Read More
Success

What Joe Rogan and George Carlin Bits Can Teach You About Optimal Behavior

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, January 4 2023

Are you an idiot or a maniac? I know, that's a strange way to start a blog post. But, in all seriousness, it's an interesting dichotomy that shows the ethical continuum that we all use when making decisions and then passing judgment on others for theirs. Let's take a look at this through the lens of two famous stand-up jokes from popular

Read More
Happiness

Life Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, November 9 2022

Life is all about growth, but we live in a world with a near-incalculable (i.e., how many bottom of the ocean?) number of organisms on it, all competing for growth-enabling resources.  Trees compete for sunlight, animals compete over food and water, and some animals have to eat others to survive.  Naturally, it would seem that the fight-for-your-li...

Read More
Planning

The Value of an Internal Locus of Control

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 7 2022

There is a trend today that people not-so-affectionately call the “oppression Olympics” where people compete to see who can claim the most victimhood so that they achieve certain benefits such as more power, influence, and control over how others behave in relation to them (full disclosure: I come from a poor background and am guilty of trying to o...

Read More
Growth

Your Failures Aren't a Waste

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 24 2022

Do you remember your first steps? (Probably not) Do you remember someone else’s first steps, such as a child’s?  In either case, there was a lot of failure involved in the process.  Maybe the child wasn’t strong enough yet, or maybe they fell a bunch of times.  Maybe they were scared.  Yet no one remembers that nor points to their failures while le...

Read More
Success

The Positive Outcome

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 27 2022

There is one unifying goal in all of life: the positive outcome.  Everyone is looking for that one meaning in life that makes them feel fulfilled: service to others, love, happiness, pleasure, achievement, learning, personal growth, financial success, respect, or appreciation.  The truth is that it is all growth-related, as everyone looks forward t...

Read More
Meaning

Own Your Choices

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, June 15 2022

Depending on how you count what a “choice” is, you’ll make hundreds of thousands to billions and billions of choices in your lifetime.  Choices include the big ones like which school to go to, which jobs to apply for, and whether or not you marry or reproduce as well as the little ones like where you focus your attention at any given time or whethe...

Read More
Growth

Don't Wait for Conditions to Improve to Begin Your Journey

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, May 18 2022

In my blog post a few weeks ago, “If You Want to Be Happy, Then You Have to Be Happy”, I spoke about how if you wait for things to be better before you’re happy, then you are making yourself miserable now for a future that either will come (and you’ll have been miserable for no reason up until then) or will never come (and you’ll always be miserabl...

Read More
Next