“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:...
Read MoreOne 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...
Read MoreIn 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...
Read MoreThis is a difficult post for me because my mind immediately goes to everything that's difficult for me to be disciplined about: I know that there are many more for others, from calling their friends and family to saving money every paycheck to doing their homework. There are many things in life that require frequent or strenuous work to attain or...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreI'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 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 MoreWe 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 MoreAre 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 MoreLife 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...
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