Jul 31
“I sound like an idiot.” “I’m not trying hard enough.” “I’m not writing anything interesting.” “I’m not doing enough good for society.” “I should be a better [mom/daughter/wife/friend/employee/boss/citizen].”
I never knew what to call this silent-but-mighty voice until I started reading and learning more about psychology, interacting with more coaches, and reading more self-helpy stuff. I can now proudly name this voice: it’s my inner critic. Read more
Milwaukee International Airport (MKE) has lots of things most other airports don’t have — cheeseheads for sale, one of the best used bookstores around, ping-pong tables, an Alterra coffeeshop, lots of friendly Midwesterners, and most notably, a “Recombobulation Area.” Read more
We all need inspiration sometimes…here are a few places I often find it.
Where do you turn when you need a burst of inspiration? And have you ever thought of simply making a list to remind you?
“At work we hail the person for whom science and teaching is above all else, who forgets to eat and drink while working feverously on getting the right answer, who is always there to have dinner and discussion with eager undergrads. At home we admire the parent who sacrificed everything for the sake of a better life for their children, even at great personal expense. The best scientists. The best parents. Anything less is not giving it your best. And then I had an even more depressing epiphany. That in such a world I was destined to suck at both.”
This is an excerpt from an essay Radhika Nagpal, a Harvard Professor of Computer Science, wrote for Scientific American today. I’m far from her situation — fighting for tenure in one of the most competitive academic fields and institutions around — but I really related to much of what she talks about. Read more
Earlier this week, twenty-two children died in the state of Bihar in northeastern India. They didn’t do anything wrong. They just ate lunch. They ate rice and beans and potato curry and soy balls. They started feeling a little sick, and then a lot sick, and then some of them died. It all happened within a few hours.
Stories about tragedies run constantly in the media, and I often skim over them in favor of the shiny, happy stuff. But once in a while a story hits home, and that’s what happened to me when I read this one. The child The New York Times talked about in its story, Ashish Kumar Mishra, was five years old. His dad carried him from clinic to clinic until he ran out of options, and Ashish died at his side. Read more
Three great learnings/reminders from tonight’s yoga class:
A friend recently asked me what I think the toughest thing is about “having it all,” and without hesitation, my answer was “trying to have it all.” Rather than trying to have it all, for a long time, I’ve been thinking about success as having “my all” — defining what matters most, shuffling and prioritizing time and activities to support that, and being clear and okay with whatever trade-offs need to happen because of it. Once these priorities are set and tied up with a fancy bow (for about four seconds until they change again), they’re clarifying and guiding and empowering. But the getting there…negotiating the trade-offs either internally or with loved ones…letting go of an idea or situation or even an identity…is messy and hard and wrought with emotion. Read more
My son is learning how to swim. After a few years of being tentative around the water, he suddenly loves it — grinning throughout every minute of the splashing and kicking and flailing and sputtering that inevitably mark the early days of swimming. He hasn’t figured out the difference between a jump and a belly flop yet, and he earnestly looks up for approval every time he slams his stomach onto the water. I try to smile encouragingly when it happens, and immediately brace myself for him to do it again. He “floats,” if only for a few seconds before the teacher scoops his legs up using one of those styrofoamy noodle things. And when he gets out, we talk in detail about how it feels to float, wondering if it’s how astronauts feel when they’re walking on the moon. When he watches the adults gliding through the water a few lanes over, his eyes glimmer. “I’m going to swim like that someday,” he says confidently. “You sure will,” I reply.
Eagerly strapping on his little neon green goggles, my son is intoxicated by the thrill of learning something new…of getting a little bit better and a tad bit more confident and notably stronger every single day. I covered the idea of learning new information a few weeks ago in a post called “Girl Meets Cheese,” but I think it’s worthwhile to think about learning new skills too. When was the last time you learned how to DO something new? Something totally brand new — like walking or talking or swimming or playing the guitar or riding a unicycle? As we get older, it feels like our opportunities to learn how to do new things diminish; but in reality, the only things that diminish are our willingness to fail and our perceived ability to learn new things and our bandwidth to make time for them. The new things can be small — like how to bake bread with quinoa flour (something I’m going to try to learn this weekend), or big — like how to code (which I’d love to learn). And the little things matter just as much as the big things…I’d even dare to say they might help keep us young.
When I think about the things I’d like to learn how to do, here’s a quick and rough laundry list:
What’s on your bucket list to learn in the future? And what’s the last thing you’re proud you DID learn?
P.S. If you read this post in hopes of getting a swim workout to try, here’s one I posted a few months ago!
Jul 3
photo by jessica wilson, via flickr creative commons
Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported on a study showing that people with a lot of self-control are happier. When I came across the article, it was easy for me to see how this might be true in the longish-term (i.e., “I feel happy because I set out to avoid ice cream every day for the last month, and I succeeded”), but my gut instinct was to question whether the subjects were actually happier in the short-term…in the moment. After all, ice cream is delicious.
The researchers wondered this too, and completed a follow-up study to look at this exact question. Surprisingly, the results showed higher short-term happiness as well, reportedly because people with a lot of self-control don’t actually feel they’re denying themselves anything. Rather, they get and stay ahead of the temptation, shutting it down before it can even enter their consciousness. This might sound something like “I don’t eat ice cream.”
Call me a hedonist, but I’m still skeptical, despite this evidence and the (I’d guess) related data on delayed gratification (see: Stanford Marshmallow Experiment). The thing is, I fear that self-control = boring/not fun. And I think we can create a lot of happy moments by doing things that might be just a little bit reckless: staying up late with friends despite knowing we have a 5am wake-up call, running a race despite a nagging injury, saying “I love you” a bit too soon, speaking our mind without completely weighing the costs and benefits.
What this study boils down to for me is plain old common sense: focus on the areas where self-control really matters and ruthlessly get out ahead of the temptation. If you have blood sugar issues, don’t keep sweets in the house. If you’re tempted to spend money you don’t have, avoid shopping. If you can’t stay off your phone when you’re with your kids, turn it off. And once those hard and fast decisions are out of the way, be easy on yourself. Balance limit-pushing with self-control, and carpe diem without losing sight of what lies ahead.
What do you think? In what parts of your life is self-control really important, and where are you happy to indulge?
Living in a world in which it’s easy to get stuck in a myopic view of what it means to be “smart,” I love this reminder from Rumi, a renowned 13th century poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.
Two Kinds of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.
I’ve recently been trying to take a few minutes each day to read Rumi’s wisdom, and I’ve found it calming and centering. I’m always looking for new ideas — what do you read/listen to when you’re looking for spiritual grounding?
Learning from parenting and life, while trying to get dinner on the table
A quixotic quest for the bright side.
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Posts with strategies and tactics on building great products and how to be a better leader
Tim Ferriss is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.
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Marginalia on our search for meaning.
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