A few years ago, during a particularly chaotic period at work, I started making my morning coffee the exact same way every day: same mug, same timing, same two minutes of silence while it brewed.

It wasn’t intentional; I was just too overwhelmed to think about it. But something interesting happened: Those two minutes became the calmest part of my day. Even when everything else felt out of control, I had this one predictable moment that somehow made the rest manageable.

I had just experienced the power of rituals completely by accident, and it wasn’t until I left tech to study neuroscience that I understood why that simple coffee routine had been so effective.

Rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind.

Most people think of rituals as elaborate religious ceremonies or ancient traditions. But your life is actually filled with them.

Waiting for everyone to be served before eating, giving presents for birthdays and holidays, saying “hello” and exchanging scripted pleasantries, clapping at the end of a performance — all of these are rituals woven throughout our days.

Since the dawn of time, humans have used rituals to acknowledge one another, signal belonging, mark beginnings and endings, and more.

In fact, I believe rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind. Think of them as repetitive, patterned, often culturally transmitted “software” that serves psychological functions that go far beyond mere habit or tradition.

The psychology and neuroscience of rituals

When people face stress, danger, or major life changes, rituals provide a sense of stability through structured actions. Having something concrete to do when everything appears uncertain reduces anxiety and feelings of helplessness.

This sense of agency extends to rituals’ broader social function: Shared routines make cooperation easier in times of stress. When a team huddles before a game, the action signals membership and commitment to the group.

Rituals also help us make sense of life’s most challenging moments. They mark transitions — such as birth, puberty, marriage, and death — and help us navigate events that feel overwhelming. They also support us as we forge a new identity through rites of passage. That’s why graduation ceremonies don’t just celebrate achievement; they help transform a person’s identity from “student” to “graduate.”

Lastly, rituals transmit culture across generations. Children learn gratitude from family dinner traditions, not from lectures about being thankful. Repeatedly doing something together works better than just talking about it.

Rituals are like a software upgrade for your nervous system. They affect your brain and body in three specific ways:

1. Calm. Rituals help quiet the brain’s threat-detection system, especially the amygdala. When that system calms down, we feel more grounded. This is one reason repeating familiar sequences of actions helps during chaotic transitions.
2. Clarity. Predictable steps activate parts of the prefrontal cortex involved in planning, which reduces mental load as your brain doesn’t have to constantly decide what comes next. This makes challenging tasks feel more manageable, especially under stress.
3. Connection. When people move or speak in sync, the brain releases bonding chemicals, such as oxytocin and endogenous opioids. These make social interactions feel warmer and more trusting. That’s why shared rituals create a sense of “us.”

Most rituals are inherited from the culture around us — we simply adopt what we see others doing. But here’s the part I find most exciting: You don’t have to copy-paste rituals from others. You can consciously design rituals that serve your specific needs.

How to design your own rituals

Creating personal rituals that serve your specific needs only takes a bit of observation, experimentation, and reflection.

• Start with observation. Notice the moments in your day when you feel scattered, stressed, or disconnected. These transition points are perfect opportunities for designing a new ritual.
• Next, experiment. Pick one specific moment in your day and try a simple ritual. Maybe it’s making your morning coffee the same way each day, arranging your desk before work, or taking three deep breaths before important meetings. The key is choosing something small enough to stick with yet meaningful enough to feel intentional.
• Finally, reflect and adjust. After a week or two, ask yourself: Does this ritual actually help? Does it feel natural or forced? Pretend to be a scientist and answer these questions from a place of curiosity. Tweak as needed.

The most effective personal rituals are simple enough to remember, specific enough to feel meaningful, and flexible enough to adapt to different circumstances. Start small with one daily ritual, then gradually expand your toolkit.

These repeated patterns of action will help you actively program your brain for resilience, clarity, and connection. Use them before exams, competitions, or challenging conversations. Keep experimenting and adapting them as you and your circumstances change.

Your brain is already wired to respond to rituals — you just need to give it the right patterns to follow.

This article Why your brain needs everyday rituals is featured on Big Think.

When I was finishing university, I was so anxious about what came next that I started applying for jobs an entire year before graduation. When I left a big tech job, I threw myself straight into a startup. I rushed into new relationships after breakups, or into the next project as soon as the previous one ended.

I’ve often filled the gaps too quickly, because the in-between felt impossible to sit with. And I know I’m not the only one.

Maybe you’ve left a job without knowing what’s next, moved to a new city, or found yourself in that strange territory after a relationship ends.

These moments are destabilizing. You’re standing in the hallway between who you were and who you’re becoming. Your brain screams for certainty, for solid ground, for the familiar rhythms of a life you understand.

What if I told you that this discomfort isn’t a bug in your psychology, but a feature?

These uncomfortable in-between spaces have a name in anthropology: liminal spaces. And they’re not just inevitable parts of life. They can be a laboratory for transformation, creativity, and growth.

The uncomfortable in-between

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, which means “threshold.” Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep first described liminal spaces in 1909 as the middle phase of rites of passage, that ambiguous period when we leave an old identity behind but haven’t yet stepped into a new one.

Liminal spaces change how the brain processes information. The anterior cingulate cortex, your brain’s conflict detector, becomes hyperactive in ambiguous situations. Meanwhile, your amygdala starts firing warning signals about potential threats lurking in the unknown.

This neurological response evolved to keep our ancestors alive in genuinely dangerous situations. But in modern liminal spaces, it often backfires, creating anxiety about changes that could actually be opportunities for growth.

The key insight is that uncertainty itself isn’t inherently negative — it’s simply ambiguous information that our brains need to process — and that liminal spaces offer unique cognitive benefits that aren’t available during periods of stability:

• Learning: Your brain pays intense attention to new information when it can’t predict what’s coming next, making liminal spaces ideal for learning.
• Creativity and problem-solving: When your usual assumptions are suspended, your brain makes novel connections you’d normally miss.
• Self-discovery: Escaping the constraints of your usual self-concept when you’re between roles or life phases allows you to experiment with aspects of your identity that might have remained dormant in more stable times.
• Resilience: Each time you successfully navigate a liminal space, you develop uncertainty tolerance, the ability to remain functional even when you can’t predict outcomes.

But these benefits aren’t automatic. You need to actively shift how you respond to uncertainty.

How to flip the switch

The key to leveraging liminal spaces lies in what I call the anxiety-curiosity switch. Both anxiety and curiosity are responses to uncertainty, but they lead to very different outcomes.

Anxiety narrows your focus to eliminate uncertainty as quickly as possible. Curiosity expands it to explore what the uncertainty might reveal.

Research shows that curiosity and anxiety activate similar brain regions, with an important difference: In anxiety, these regions prioritize threat detection; in curiosity, they support exploration and learning.

And flipping the switch is a learnable skill. Here are three evidence-based practices that can help you transform uncertainty from threat into opportunity:

1. Cognitive reappraisal: Reframe the narrative. Instead of viewing liminal spaces as something to escape, practice reframing them as a laboratory for discovery. When you catch yourself thinking “I hate not knowing what’s next,” try “I wonder what this transition might teach me.” This form of cognitive reappraisal will reduce activity in the amygdala while increasing activity in prefrontal regions associated with executive control.

2. Generative questioning: Become a detective. Transform uncertainty from something that happens to you into something you actively investigate. Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” try “What possibilities am I not seeing yet?” Switching to generative questions shifts your brain toward discovery rather than threat detection.

3. Personal experimentation: Conduct tiny experiments. Try a new habit or activity for a short trial period – a week of morning writing, or solo lunch somewhere new every Tuesday. This experimental mindset satisfies your brain’s need for action while keeping your approach to uncertainty exploratory.

In a world where skills, relationships, and even identities change faster than ever, the ability to thrive in liminal spaces is essential.

So the next time you find yourself in that uncomfortable hallway between what was and what might be, remember: You’re not lost. You’re standing at the threshold of transformation, in a space designed by evolution to help you grow.

Your brain is already equipped with everything it needs for this transformation. All that’s required is the courage to flip the switch.

This article Why liminal spaces are your brain’s secret laboratory is featured on Big Think.

Forty years ago, Donald Homa, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University specializing in memory and the visual perception of linguistic stimuli, was contacted by officials at the American Speed Reading Academy with an extraordinary tale. Two of their pupils had achieved a reading rate in excess of 100,000 words per minute, more than ten times the speed of the Academy’s average student and more than 300 times what a college-educated adult can muster (between 200 and 400 words per minute). Would he be willing to assess their prodigious skills in a laboratory setting?

Curious, Homa happily obliged. In the lab, he tasked the two men with speed reading an entire college-level textbook and then taking a multiple-choice test to gauge their comprehension. After finishing the text in mere minutes, they took the test and absolutely bombed. They hadn’t learned much of anything.

“The only noteworthy skill exhibited by the two speed readers was a remarkable dexterity in page-turning,” Homa concluded.

While this episode is admittedly anecdotal, it does exemplify what scientists have broadly learned about speed reading: It doesn’t work.

Two reasons speed reading doesn’t work

For well over half a century, speed reading courses have promised to drastically accelerate one’s reading ability with no detriment to comprehension. Proponents claim people can become speed readers by learning to take in more words with less eye movement and by silencing their inner speech that accompanies reading.

Summarizing decades of research in an article published in 2016, an all-star team of cognitive scientists and linguists specializing in reading ability and visual perception debunked both of these tenets.

First, how human vision works, including the very structure of the eye, doesn’t allow us to see words on the periphery of our visual field with enough clarity to fully take in their meaning. The notion that whole blocks of words can be understood at a glance is nonsensical. Moreover, experiments have repeatedly shown that speed readers’ peripheral vision is no better than that of a regular reader. It’s something that can’t be leveled up.

Second, silencing one’s inner reading voice can permit one to intake text more quickly; however, it comes at the expense of comprehension. Sounds are key to language, so translating visual information into phonological (sound) form, even just in one’s head, is necessary for complete understanding of written words.

Reading, fast and slow

Even so, proponents of speed reading programs point to data showing that students’ reading speed improves while maintaining comprehension. Students are given a pre- and post-test and seem to experience a sizable improvement; however, the authors of the 2016 report countered that these results are generally bogus.

“Sometimes the pre-test is harder than the post-test, and other times trainees are tested repeatedly on the same material,” they write. “In both cases, it is inevitable that their performance will be better on the post-test merely because of the relative difficulty of the tests or because of repeated exposure.”

When scientists have rigorously scrutinized speed reading courses, they have repeatedly found that students do indeed boost their reading rate, measured in words per minute, but this acceleration comes at the expense of comprehension. The faster people read, the less they remember what they have read.

Nowadays, some apps purport to make speed reading easy. Most of these present a text’s words one at a time in the same spot, allowing the user to adjust the presentation speed. This method, termed “rapid serial visual presentation,” permits the reader’s gaze to remain fixed — eliminating the supposedly wasteful need to scan from word to word. Alas, these apps don’t work either. As users increase the text presentation speed, their comprehension falls.

Take a look, it’s in a book

So if speed reading is bogus, is there any way to read more quickly? Yes, the authors of the 2016 article say.

The answer is to read more, in conjunction with expanding one’s vocabulary. Such practice is admittedly time-consuming, but like so many other skills that require hours and hours of repetition to perfect, reading ability must be honed through effort. Like a pianist playing every day for years, a basketball player taking endless shots, or a pilot spending thousands of hours in the air, expertise takes time. It cannot be taught by way of a 12-week training program.

This article Neuroscience shows that speed reading is bullshit is featured on Big Think.

9 a.m. on Saturday. I’m sitting at the café, laptop open, surrounded by the chatter of customers, and the scattered debris of modern knowledge work. Three half-finished articles. Two consulting projects with looming deadlines. Emails multiplying like rabbits. And somewhere in the mental background, the nagging sense that I should be exercising, calling my parents, and planning next week’s content calendar for Substack.

My attention ping-ponged. The article deadline that felt manageable yesterday now loomed. The client presentation that should take an hour felt like it would consume my entire weekend. Even checking email felt like wading into a swamp.

Everything screamed “urgent,” but nothing felt achievable. I couldn’t see it in the moment, but the scattered feeling stemmed more from how I was directing my attention than a lack of willpower or time management. I used to think successful people innately had better focus. Turns out, they just knew something about their brains that too often escapes the rest of us: It’s possible to direct your attention with the same intentionality with which you direct your muscles at the gym.

We’re facing an attention crisis today that previous generations never had to navigate. Social media notifications, Slack messages, email alerts, and the endless scroll of information have created what researchers call “continuous partial attention.” We’re always on, but never fully focused, just perpetually scattered.

Beyond mere inconvenience, a lack of “full” attention can actively sabotage our most important goals and make everything feel unsatisfying or insurmountable. Each task appears more overwhelming because your attention simultaneously tracks five other “urgent” priorities, all claiming to be the most important. The result can be that all tasks get nudged into the periphery of your attention.

The focus of your gaze

Dr. Emily Balcetis, a social psychologist at NYU who studies visual perception and goal achievement, has spent years uncovering how our attention shapes our reality. In our conversation, she lights up as she explains how simple attention shifts can transform lives.

She illustrates with an example: Think of your eyes like a flashlight. The center beam shows color and detail clearly, while the outer glow only catches movement. Balcetis demonstrates this with a simple experiment: Have someone stand behind you with a credit card, then bring it around from your peripheral vision toward the center. You’ll be shocked at how close to the front it needs to come before you can even tell what color it is.

“You can’t tell color in peripheral vision,” Balcetis says with a laugh. “Super good at detecting motion, bad at details, bad at color.”

Still, seeing something clearly doesn’t guarantee you’re actually paying attention to it.

“We’ve all experienced our eyes moving across book pages while our mind wandered elsewhere,” Balcetis notes. “Even though our eyes capture the words, we don’t have the conscious recognition of knowing what we just read.”

The same thing happens with goals. We trick ourselves into thinking that throwing time at a task means we’re focusing on it, even though a crucial chunk of our attention is scattered elsewhere. By the end of the day, you’ve been “busy” for eight hours but made no meaningful progress on what matters most. You may feel exhausted instead of energized.

This insight — that attention determines what we actually process — reveals why traditional goal-setting approaches can fall short. We know what we want to achieve, but often overlook the attention mechanisms that enable us to achieve it.

Training your attention

Think of attention not as one muscle, but as a complex system with specialized components that can be trained independently. Just as your body has leg muscles for running and arm muscles for lifting, your attention has different muscles for different mental tasks.

When we break down what it means to “pay attention,” we’re really talking about several distinct processes: what you’re looking at + what you’re thinking about + how your brain merges and assigns meaning to these signals = what gets your full attention.

Like any muscle system, attention responds to progressive training. The four methods below train different attention muscles that work together for goal achievement.

Tool #1: Your visual focus muscle

Your attention system’s first specialized component is visual focus — your brain’s ability to narrow or widen your attention spotlight. When this muscle is strong, goals can literally look closer and more achievable.

Balcetis discovered that narrowing visual attention — focusing intensely on a specific target rather than taking in the whole environment — makes people experience that target as literally closer than it actually is.

“Reducing that spotlight’s diameter so that we’re intensely focused on just a target up in the distance makes us experience it as closer,” she explains, gesturing as if adjusting a camera lens. “It’s not just that we’re tricking ourselves into thinking it’s closer. We are visually experiencing it as closer to us.”

This can change behavior, not just perception. In recent research on how visual focus affects exercise performance, Balcetis and her colleagues found that when runners and walkers fix their gaze on a single target ahead, they tend to push harder and go farther than when they let their attention wander across the wider environment. 

How this muscle strengthens: Your visual focus muscle gets stronger when you practice narrowing your attention spotlight. In practice, this means picking a specific visual target related to your goal. If you’re walking or running, focus intensely on a specific point ahead. If you’re working toward a deadline or an abstract goal, experiment with putting a visual representation of completion in your line of sight, like a physical or digital “whiteboard” of your efforts visible in your office, and narrow your attention to that reminder.

Once your visual focus muscle can narrow attention effectively, the next challenge is connecting that focused attention to meaningful future outcomes.

Tool #2: Your temporal connection muscle

Your brain’s second attentional specialization is temporal connection — your capacity to link present actions to future outcomes. This muscle determines whether today’s sacrifices feel worth making to receive tomorrow’s benefits, which can be difficult to weigh accurately because we tend to struggle to connect our present selves with our future selves, especially distant-future selves.

Balcetis collaborated with UCLA researcher Hal Hirschfield, who presented participants with digitally aged photos of themselves, illustrating what they might look like in 30 to 40 years. Then he asked: If you received $1,000 unexpectedly, how much would you save for retirement?

Spending a few minutes looking at a photo of their older selves made people save twice as much for retirement. The future self suddenly felt real, relevant, and worth sacrificing for.

How this muscle strengthens: Your temporal connection muscle strengthens when you practice vividly connecting present actions to future outcomes. For any goal requiring present sacrifice for future benefit, spend time experiencing the specific day-to-day life of your successful future self. Think about what Tuesday morning looks like after you’ve accomplished this goal. What do you do? How do you feel? What problems have disappeared from your life?

Tool #3: Your obstacle-processing muscle

With your temporal connection muscle engaged, you might expect positive visualization to help. But most goal-setting advice falls short by focusing solely on training your visualization abilities without developing your obstacle-processing muscle — your brain’s capacity to plan around challenges while maintaining motivation.

We’re told to visualize success, but research shows that pure positive visualization can actually demotivate us. Gabrielle Oettingen at NYU measured people’s blood pressure (a proxy for psychological readiness to act) while they engaged in different types of visualization. Those who only fantasized about positive outcomes showed lower systolic blood pressure than those who visualized success and then thought through potential obstacles and backup plans.

“It’s vicarious satisfaction,” Balcetis explains, shaking her head at how counterintuitive this finding is. “It feels like ‘Well, I’ve already achieved it, and so I can chill out.'”

The people who stayed energized were those who combined positive visualization with obstacle planning, imagining both the great outcome and the things that could go wrong, along with specific strategies for handling those challenges.

How this muscle strengthens: Combine positive visualization with obstacle planning. For any significant goal, try this three-part visualization: Imagine the successful outcome in vivid detail, identify the most likely obstacles you’ll face, and create specific “if-then” plans for handling each obstacle.

This prepares rather than pessimizes. Obstacles will arise, and you’ll pivot rather than panic because you’ve already rehearsed the response.

Tool #4: Your cognitive flexibility muscle

The three attention muscles mentioned above work together, but they can be strengthened by training a completely different cognitive system through seemingly unrelated activities. Just as physical cross-training builds strength that transfers to your main sport, training your cognitive flexibility muscle can make it easier for you to switch between different types of focused attention.

Balcetis met Giorgio Piccoli, CEO of American Flat, who has an unusual daily practice: He makes a list of 10 things. Not a to-do list, just 10 observations, ideas, or connections. At a restaurant called Rosemary’s, he might list 10 ways they could leverage their name in their menu (starting with: “They don’t have a drink with rosemary in it. That’s ridiculous.”).

“Do these ever become lucrative ideas?” Balcetis once asked him. “Almost never,” he replied. “But that habit is just a way that I’m practicing creative thinking and problem solving.”

How this muscle strengthens: Your cognitive flexibility muscle grows when you practice sustained focus on activities unrelated to your main goals. Pick one seemingly unproductive attention-training activity and practice it consistently. It could be juggling, sketching, doing crosswords, or Piccoli’s “10 things” lists. The key is choosing something that requires focused attention but that exercises different neural pathways than your primary work.

Just as runners do yoga to improve their running, training unrelated attention skills makes your main goals easier to achieve.

Attention as a trainable system

The difference between people who achieve their most important goals and those who stay stuck often isn’t talent, luck, or even opportunity. It’s mastering the invisible skill that makes everything else possible: intentional, directed attention. Amid endless notifications, infinite scroll, and continuous partial attention, this skill is more critical than ever. 

That Saturday morning taught me something I see repeatedly in my work with high achievers: Brilliant people who can solve complex problems at work often feel powerless to direct their own attention toward what matters most. The same scattered focus that trapped me at the café shows up in executives who can’t find time for strategic thinking, in consultants who dream of starting their own practice but never make progress, in leaders who know exactly what they should prioritize but somehow never do. 

But once you understand attention as a trainable muscle system rather than a fixed trait, things change. Now, your attention can be strengthened, directed, and optimized for the outcomes you want most. That shift (I can improve my attention) means the question is no longer about whether you have goals worth achieving. The better question becomes whether you’re willing to train the skills that make achieving those goals inevitable.

This article Why your attention keeps slipping away (and how to get it back) is featured on Big Think.

It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “How would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.

Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is.

Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains leaden — people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t sound natural. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)

Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I can break their talents down into steps. My personality naturally distorts the imitation, but that’s fine — I tell myself that’s just my own spin on being a charming conversationalist.

Something like this works in lots of other places. I’ve productively pretended to be someone else on fundraising calls, while singing in the shower, or when doing my makeup for a special occasion. I’m convinced I could do a halfway decent restoration job on an old rusted tool, just for all the My Mechanics I’ve osmosed over time.

I.

This is not totally strange. It’s clear that humans are mimicry machines — this is a huge part of how babies learn. We pick up the marvelous talent of native speakers long before we can consciously understand the concept of “grammar.” Same goes with walking, facial expressions, and social scripts.

Only later do we develop explicit reasoning: the ability to break the world down into representations, descriptions, and symbols that float above it, in the mental plane of experience. Much of our knowledge acquisition takes place there, in simulated reality. It’s miraculous: we can absorb and combine symbols that tell us how to use our new appliance. We can take a string of language like “push your heels through the floor” and use it to lift weights more capably. But in the process, we let our mimicry muscle atrophy, and we forget its power. When we want to learn to play tennis, for example, we might think to ask questions like, “What makes a good tennis player?” rather than trusting our ability to pick it up via pure observation.

This is roughly what Tim Gallwey discovered when coaching tennis players, as described in The Inner Game of Tennis. Like most coaches, he gave students verbal instructions, which they asked for. But when he tried to break down a perfect swing into a set of explicit steps, the students made awkward and jumbled movements. On the other hand, when he simply showed them what great form looked like and asked them to act like a baby and figure it out, their bodies adjusted on their own.

The improvement came not from explicit reasoning, but from letting a deeper, more intuitive system take over. It’s easier to imitate wholeness than it is to assemble it from parts.

II.

Beginner chess players often know that grandmasters don’t recommend getting their queen out early, because the queen can be threatened by other pieces and chased around the board. It’s one of the first early-game principles that players learn. But beginner players do it anyway because it’s fun to engage in unstrategic aggression, and beginners lose lots of games this way. However, if they simply think, “what would a better player do,” their instincts improve.

I think this should be at least a little bit surprising, the fact that our mimicry abilities can extend to latent space like this. Some combination of largely unconscious mental processes gives us the ability to simulate the thinking of others, even though we have no direct ability to observe it. Think of how quickly you can tell, just from an unusual text message, that a friend is unhappy. Even if we have only a small sample of observations of someone whose instincts we trust deeply, we probably have enough material to ask, “Does it seem like they would do this?” Trying to explicitly reason about the basis of ethical action is complicated. But it’s pretty simple to ask, “What would Jesus do?”

III.

Also surprising: I’ve had luck harnessing mimicry for performance gains even when the person I call to mind isn’t an expert in the specific task at hand, but rather just a generally competent person.

Once, when I was staying with friends an hour outside of London, another American came to visit. When she showed up in a rental car, she announced that she’d learned to drive stick on the way over. As in: she landed at the airport, realized all the rentals were manual, and just decided that it couldn’t be that hard. She looked up instructions, grabbed the shifter, and set out driving on the wrong side of the road, on the highway.

Now, it might sound reckless when I say it that way, but you are missing the context that this woman was incredibly cool. She was so self-assured that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to have done. She narrated the story without apparent amazement about her learning. And, I thought: oh, that is what a generally competent person looks like.

For some time after that, whenever I stepped up to a wholly foreign task, like learning archery, rather than asking myself what an archer would do, I would ask myself what that woman would do — how she would approach this totally alien endeavor. And hand to God, much of the time, it made me better at it immediately.

Beginners are often neurotic, alternating between I better not fuck this up and I’m going to fuck this up. Pretending I was that woman allowed me to skip all of that, until I eventually became enough like her that I could stop relying on it.

IV.

What happens when you get good enough at something that there’s no one obvious left to mimic? If you define excellence the way most people do — by reference to the people around you — you might simply declare yourself magnificent and be done with it. But bizarrely, the ability to simulate and mimic higher levels of capability sometimes seems to generalize to higher and higher levels of capacity, even beyond the apparent top of the scale. (Cf. this tweet from Nick Cammarata.)

It’s the most natural thing in the world to define excellence based on what we see around us. We might deem ourselves to have had a productive day if we were focused a little bit longer than our colleagues, or maybe we did well at the gym if we matched the performance of our friend who’s been coming for 6 months longer. However, often, these comparative metrics are completely arbitrary. More likely than not, everyone around you is operating at a lower standard than they’re capable of.

Throughout most of history, it seemed impossible that someone could run a 10-second 100m, climb Everest, or land a 900 on a skateboard. But once someone did, they were followed in relatively quick succession by many others. At a certain point in history, physiologists believed that the human lung would collapse under water pressure at a depth around 30m, making deeper free diving impossible. This was proven false by Jacques Mayol, who in 1968 hit a 70m free dive. Since then, the record has been surpassed many times, and currently stands at 214m — over 7x what was once deemed physically impossible for the human body.

These breakthroughs did not happen because an update to the laws of physics was rolled out by the game developers of Earth. The most straightforward explanation is that once a certain standard was shown to be achievable, many more people successfully aspired to it and then set about to improve on it.

This means that setting the standard of “I’m going to be better than anyone doing it today” is not necessarily unrealistic.

Poker provides an interesting illustration.

Basically every poker pro today is better than every pro 20 years ago — and plenty of people in 2005 believed they were good at poker! But they were actually nowhere near the ceiling of excellence. In hindsight, poker in 2005 was basically pre-competitive — people had no idea how much better they could be.

When I started playing poker, I discovered that physical reads seemed to still be pre-competitive — as far as I can tell, there had not been a genuinely determined effort to figure out just how much information could be extracted from the body language of opponents. This was true despite the fact that most pros believed all the juice had already been wrung out of tells in the early days, that people had figured out how to not leak information while engaged in the “real work” of math and game theory.

I capitalized on this by systematically improving my physical reads, to the point where I was among the best in the world at it for a period of time, along with a few friends who put in the same effort. In my mind, besides luck, this is what explains nearly all of my success in poker — I was never exceptional at the level of the mechanics of the game.

If you asked, about physical reads, “what would someone much better than me do to improve,” you would probably come up with an answer similar to mine: read everything on the topic, then on adjacent topics, then on vaguely related topics; watch hundreds of hours of streams on silent with hole cards covered, trying to find patterns; find other people who were similarly obsessed and trade tips with them; relentlessly make notes of the mannerisms of every person you ever played twice with so you could combine observations from multiple sessions. You know, take it seriously.

Whatever you’re working at today, you might consider the possibility that it’s also pre-competitive, even if it feels “late” to other people. Many, many human beings had engaged in distance running before the four-minute mile was achieved in 1954. So, if a given skill plays a crucial load-bearing function in your life, try to completely ignore the standards others set and assume there’s a much higher standard to which you can aspire. Try to internalize this insane belief: “I’m going to be better at this than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

This article How to instantly be better at things is featured on Big Think.

I know I’m running on empty when I find myself endlessly scrolling through my phone at 11pm, lying in bed, thumb-flicking through an infinite stream of content. It’s a familiar cycle: one more post, one more video, one more refresh.

Each swipe delivers a tiny hit of something, just enough to keep me going. It’s only when I finally put the phone down that I realize what just happened: my brain’s reward system, designed to keep me alive, has been hijacked by an app designed to keep me scrolling.

This is the double-edged sword of dopamine. On one hand, this neurotransmitter might be considered the engine of human achievement. On the other hand, it’s incredibly vulnerable to manipulation by modern technology and instant gratification culture.

But once you understand how your reward system works, you can consciously redirect it toward the things that actually matter to you. Let’s explore the connection between slot machines, social media, and the secret to a more curious, fulfilling life.

The science behind your reward system

Your brain’s reward system is a network of regions that releases dopamine in response to rewarding stimuli. Think of dopamine as your brain’s “want” signal. It doesn’t create pleasure so much as it creates the motivation to seek pleasure.

That moment of excitement before opening a gift, the butterflies before a first date, the surge of energy when you think you might be onto something important… That’s dopamine in action. This anticipation system evolved to keep our ancestors alive by motivating them to seek food, shelter, and mates.

But modern companies have figured out how to exploit this system in ways our brains never evolved to handle.

The most powerful hijacking method? Variable reward schedules. Instead of getting a reward every time you perform an action, you get it sometimes — but you never know when.

This unpredictability creates what researchers call engineered highs, and it’s exactly how slot machines and social media apps work. Every time you pull a slot machine handle or refresh your feed, your brain releases dopamine in anticipation of a potential reward. Sometimes you get likes, comments, or interesting content, and sometimes you don’t. This uncertainty keeps you coming back for more.

The problem compounds over time. Habituation means that rewards lose their impact. You need more stimulation to feel the same satisfaction, and this creates a dopamine crash loop: craving leads to seeking, seeking leads to temporary satisfaction, satisfaction fades, and the cycle begins again.

But there’s an opportunity hidden in this loop: if you understand how your reward system works, you can deliberately align it with beneficial behaviors.

Designing a conscious reward system

The dopamine system that makes you mindlessly scroll is the same system that makes you curious and motivated by meaningful work. Once you understand how your reward system works, you can consciously redirect it. Here’s how:

1. Identify your existing reward loops. Pay attention to your triggers throughout the day. What makes you reach for your phone? What activities do you find yourself doing when you’re bored, stressed, or avoiding something? These patterns reveal where your reward system is currently misdirecting your attention and energy.
2. Replace unhealthy rewards. Instead of trying to eliminate your triggers, redirect your response to them. If you tend to scroll social media after lunch, try a micro-learning app instead. If you reach for your phone when feeling anxious, try calling a friend. Your brain already has pathways established. The key is linking new behaviors to existing rewarding routines.
3. Rewire your curiosity. Neuroscience research shows that curiosity and impulsivity share remarkable overlaps in their neural substrates. The same brain circuits that make you compulsively check your phone can make you compulsively learn new things. When you experiment with new ideas or explore unfamiliar topics, you’re creating a positive version of a variable reward schedule: you don’t know what will work, what you’ll discover, or how it will feel, and that uncertainty feels rewarding.

This transformation doesn’t happen overnight, but it starts with a single conscious choice: the next time you feel that familiar pull toward an empty reward, pause and ask yourself, “What would be a more nourishing way to feed this craving?” Then experiment with that instead.

When you recognize that your brain is constantly seeking rewarding experiences, you can become more intentional about what those experiences are. Instead of letting algorithms decide what captures your curiosity, you can leverage your brain’s natural programming to support the life you actually want to live.

This article How to escape the “dopamine crash loop” and rewire your curiosity is featured on Big Think.

The ball floated toward me, spinning 30 feet above my head. Six months later, I’d be trapped on my couch, unable to move. But in this moment, time seemed to slow as I tracked its arc, allowing the ball to arrive perfectly at my feet. With one touch, I brought it to a stop, and with a strike of my left boot, sent the ball 60 meters to land precisely in front of our right winger making his run.

I felt unstoppable, connected to something bigger than myself — some mystical element of “the game” that I had chosen to love, and that sometimes seemed to love me back.

Part of it was the mastery of self. It took discipline to transform myself into a better player, to overcome limited expectations from coaches, to surpass my own beliefs about what I was capable of. The discipline became its own reward, creating a quiet confidence that extended far beyond the field. I learned that the voice in my head saying “I can’t” is often just the first bid in a negotiation, not the final word.

Another part was what I shared with my teammates and the brotherhood forged through countless predawn practices and the shared sacrifice of sore muscles and rare nights off during the season. Together, we built a cohesive whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, around this beautiful game that had defined my life since childhood. What I didn’t understand then was that this perfect clarity would vanish, and that learning to live without it would become my life’s work.

Fast-forward six months. On my living room couch, I sat. “Get up,” I said to myself. “Get up and go work out.” No movement. “Get up, walk 30 feet across the street, and work out.” Still nothing. The athlete who once ran for hours, trained relentlessly, and played with joyful intensity couldn’t summon the will to walk 10 yards to the gym for even 20 minutes of lifting. I had graduated college, and with that came the abrupt end of my soccer career, the sport I had played since I could walk, following in my dad’s professional footsteps.

For two decades, soccer gave me structure and purpose. The formula was clear: show up to practice, work harder than the person next to you, eat well, sleep enough, study for exams, repeat. Success had metrics. There was a guide for how to succeed. Simple inputs, predictable outputs. 

Losing that clarity hit harder than any physical challenge I’d ever faced. The scaffolding of my life had collapsed, replaced by an overwhelming web of competing priorities with no clear hierarchy, no coach telling me what mattered most, no obvious way to keep score. I felt directionless. Hollow. Lost. 

What I was experiencing was neither unique nor limited to sports. We all face this when we lose our organizing principles. The executive who retires loses the clear hierarchy and defined success metrics. The parent whose children leave home loses the structure of caregiving that organized their days. The student who graduates loses the syllabus that told them exactly what to do and when.

When the thing that once gave our life purpose disappears, how do we rebuild a sense of meaning?

Having everything, feeling nothing

While I could not have known it at the time, the struggle I faced years ago would lead me to a lifelong pursuit of understanding human behavior. It led to my PhD. It led to my current career in leadership development at InspireCorps. It led to my fascination, my obsession, and my need to write about this in my newsletter. 

It also led me to Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, behavioral scientist, and New York Times-bestselling author of books including From Strength to Strength. The former president of the American Enterprise Institute has spent decades studying what makes people truly happy, and he’s noticed a troubling pattern: We’ve lost our connection to meaning, and it’s making us unhappy.

Despite unprecedented material comfort and security, many people are experiencing a profound emptiness in their lives.

“It’s a crisis of people who have everything and feel nothing,” Brooks tells me. He’s currently deep in the writing process on this very subject, his most challenging book yet, and one he describes as “a complete dog’s breakfast at this point.”

The mess is understandable. In my own journey, I’ve struggled to even begin grasping what it feels like to have no sense of “meaning” in life. Brooks is wrestling with that same issue on a far grander scale and for a much larger audience, attempting to articulate why meaning has become the critical missing element in modern happiness, and to chart a path back to it that doesn’t rely on empty self-help.

A “blinking pixel”

In his work, Brooks observed a decline in happiness within a specific group: high achievers. After breaking happiness down into three components—enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning—he found his “blinking pixel.” While enjoyment and satisfaction remained stable, meaning was collapsing, particularly among the strivers and achievers.

Drawing on work by psychologists such as Frank Martela and Mike Steger, Brooks broke down meaning into three dimensions: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence asks why things happen the way they do. Purpose asks why you do what you do. Significance asks why your life matters.

Looking back at my soccer days through this framework, I can see what I had and what I lost. I had coherence in cause-and-effect relationships between training and performance, between effort and results. The world made sense. Purpose organized my entire existence, where every workout, meal, and sleep schedule served the larger goal of becoming better. Significance connected me to something bigger than myself, to teammates who depended on me, and a tradition and sport I was a part of.

Six months after graduation, all three had vanished.

Complex vs. complicated

Here’s where I made my crucial mistake, the one that kept me trapped on that couch for months. I tried to solve my meaning crisis like I was putting together an engine. I thought if I could just find the perfect job, the perfect routine, girlfriend, apartment—if I could arrange all the pieces correctly—meaning would automatically emerge.

This approach works for complicated problems. Complicated problems have solutions. You can solve them with enough cognitive horsepower, enough research, enough optimization. Building an app, planning a vacation, even training for soccer—these are complicated but solvable.

Meaning isn’t like that. “Meaning is the quintessential complex problem,” Brooks explains. “It can only be understood and lived with, not solved.” I had been trying to bring meaning into focus like looking through multiple kaleidoscopes at once, turning the dials frantically, hoping the perfect pattern would click into place. 

But meaning is a practice to be lived, not a machine to be perfectly constructed. 

This insight changes everything about how we approach the search for meaning. Instead of looking for the perfect formula, we need to learn how to wrestle with uncertainty. Instead of trying to eliminate complexity, we need to get better at managing it. The wrestling never stops, but it can become a partnership rather than a battle.

How to wrestle with the unsolvable

Brooks offers a practical framework for managing meaning:

Step 1: Stop the emotional spiral

“If you can’t emotionally self-manage, you can’t thrive,” Brooks tells me. “You can’t manage anything if you can’t manage yourself emotionally.”

This is the foundation upon which everything else builds. When I was trapped on my couch, I was drowning in my emotional reaction to that crisis. The panic, the self-blame, and the conviction that I was fundamentally broken all made it impossible to think clearly about what was actually happening.

Brooks taught me that the voice screaming that I was broken — that I’d never figure it out — was just my limbic system alerting me to a threat. The threat was real (loss of meaning, loss of identity), but the solution wasn’t to fix myself. It was to move the experience from my animal brain to my prefrontal cortex, where I could observe it rather than just react to it.

The metacognitive techniques he recommends are surprisingly simple: When you’re having strong feelings, write them down in a journal, which takes your thoughts out of a downward spiral and traps them on a page, giving you time to observe yourself before reacting. Now, whenever I’m feeling lost, I write three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts to move the chaos from my limbic system to my rational mind.

The goal isn’t to think your way out of complexity but to clear the deck so you can engage with it more skillfully. “Live, not just analyze,” Brooks cautions. 

Step 2: Change the question

Only once you can manage your emotional reactions can you make the fundamental shift Brooks advocates: Instead of asking, “How do I find my purpose?” we need to ask, “How do I get better at wrestling with meaning when it inevitably slips away?”

Because meaning will slip away, slowly, subtly, and then all at once. The job that once energized you will become routine. The relationship that once completed you will face challenges. The identity that once defined you will evolve or end. This is the human condition. This is not failure. We’re supposed to lose our sense of meaning periodically because we never permanently solve it. We just get faster at recognizing when we’ve lost it and better at the practices that help us find it again.

Step 3: Befriend suffering

Perhaps most counterintuitively, Brooks argues we need to reframe our relationship with difficulty. “I tell my students: you’re going to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘I’m really grateful for all the beautiful things that will happen today, and I’m also really grateful for all the things I’m going to hate. Bring it on.'”

Nobody thinks going to the gym should feel good, he points out, yet we think life should feel good. “If you’re always feeling good in the gym, there’s no muscle protein synthesis.” 

The same principle applies to meaning. Unhappiness is embedded in happiness. The willingness to wrestle with difficulty, whether it’s the physical demands of two-a-day practices or the emotional demands of losing your identity, is what builds your capacity for deeper meaning and reveals the things you truly care about.

When I ask Brooks for his most practical recommendation, he doesn’t hesitate: “Go on a silent retreat armed with the three questions of why. 1. Why do things happen the way they do in my life? 2. Why do I do the things that I do? 3. Why does my life matter and to whom?”

“Go someplace all alone, nothing to do, no devices, maybe a notebook and a pen, and sit with those things for about 48 hours.”

It sounds almost absurdly simple, but Brooks explains the neuroscience behind why it works. Meaning questions live in the right hemisphere of the brain, the side designed for complex problems and a sense of cognitive “wandering.” But our device-saturated, left-brain world rarely gives us access to that space anymore, constantly trying to solve rather than understand.

This is why Brooks’ approach feels so counterintuitive to our optimization-obsessed minds. The three questions aren’t meant to be answered definitively. They are companions for the journey that are meant to be revisited and lived with, not frozen unchanging in amber. 

Why never “finding” your purpose is actually good news

At the beginning of the year, I found myself in a familiar place, not on my couch this time, but staring at my computer screen, paralyzed by the question of whether my work actually matters. The newsletter I was starting to pour hours into, the leadership development programs I design at work, the conversations I have with clients wrestling with their own meaning crises…do any of these create real value?

If this were me a decade ago, this feeling would have sent me spiraling into panic and self-blame. Now, I recognize it as my periodic invitation to wrestle with meaning anew. Instead of trying to solve the question intellectually, I followed Brooks’ advice: I took a notebook to a quiet coffee shop, left my phone in the car, and sat with paper and pen for 90 minutes.

• Why do things happen the way they do in my life? Because I chose work that puts me in direct contact with human complexity. 
• Why do I do what I do? Because helping people navigate uncertainty feels more meaningful than providing easy answers. 
• Why does my life matter? Not because I’m changing the world in some grand way, but because I’m contributing to conversations that help people think more clearly about what they value, which creates empowered choices for a fulfilling life.

The PhD I eventually completed, the career in leadership development I built, the newsletter I now write exploring human behavior—none of these emerged from solving my meaning crisis like an equation. They emerged from learning to dance with uncertainty, to find coherence in complexity, to build purpose from the pieces available to me, to discover significance in service to others grappling with similar questions.

Brooks taught me that meaning isn’t a destination but a way of traveling. The wrestling never gets easier, but we can find joy in the difficulty. We can flip the struggle from adversarial to collaborative, letting each crisis of meaning teach us something new about ourselves and what we value. More importantly, we can get faster at moving from existential paralysis to purposeful action.

For my soccer-playing self, trapped in the belief that meaning should be permanent and given, providing a solid, sensible structure to one’s life, this would have sounded like terrible news. But it’s actually liberating. 

It means we’re never stuck. It means every ending contains the seeds of a new beginning. It means the next time you find yourself questioning everything (and you will), you don’t have to panic. You can grab a notebook, find a quiet space, and ask yourself the three questions that matter most. It means the voice in your head saying “I can’t” is just the first bid in a negotiation, not the final word.

There’s a strange irony in the search for meaning: the harder you chase it, the more elusive it becomes. But learn to wrestle with the question instead of demanding an answer, and meaning stops running. It starts dancing. Just like that perfect touch I used to feel on the field, you can’t force the magic. You can only create the conditions for it to appear. Complex problems, it turns out, prefer partners to pursuers.

This article The meaning of your life isn’t a puzzle to solve is featured on Big Think.

The plane lurched violently upward.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re making an emergency climb due to traffic in our flight path.” In other words: There’s a plane where it’s not supposed to be, so we’re getting the hell out of here.

The captain’s voice was steady, but the g-forces pressing me into my seat and the fast climb told a different story. It was the kind of airplane experience where your mind races to conclusions you’d rather not reach.

As turbulence shook the cabin, I noticed something strange happening in my body. While others gripped armrests and exchanged terrified glances, I found myself focusing on my breath to see how low I could bring my heart rate. Like a psychopath.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four.

Facing the possibility of death, I needed to know: Am I ready?

My grandfather used to say, “Make sure to have your bags packed.” Not to literally have your luggage by the door, but to be ready to leave life without regrets, unfinished business, and words left unsaid.

As Flight 447 to Orlando climbed through that storm, I did my check: Am I good with all my people?

The answer surprised me. Despite all my achievement-chasing and productivity-hacking, despite the endless striving I’ve documented in these pages…I was good. I’d added warmth, humor, and joy to the lives I’d touched. My relationships were in a good spot. The world was, perhaps, a slightly brighter place for my existence.

It honestly wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but it was a grounding one. A few minutes later, the plane leveled off. Thirty minutes later, we were safely on the ground in Orlando.

But something had shifted. The rest of that trip felt clearer, less anxious, and more grounded. The obnoxious emails waiting in my inbox had lost their sting. The “urgent” meeting that wasn’t really urgent revealed itself to be something not worth spending any additional energy on.

Death, it turns out, is an excellent BS detector, and we could be thinking about it way more often in our daily lives.

The ancient practice modern high-achievers need most

Memento mori, which literally means “remember you will die,” sounds like the kind of thing that would send modern optimizers running for longevity protocols (such as infrared light, collagen, and definitely some kind of algae) and the promise of immortality. But as Tim Ferriss observed:

“I think about death all the time and it’s not a morbid, sullen exercise for me … I find it to be, and this might sound strange, but greatly encouraging because it drives a sense of urgency, or at least time sensitivity, to a lot of my decisions.”

He goes on to describe looking at stars and contemplating that the light hitting your eye might be from a star that no longer exists. That realization isn’t an excuse for nihilism; it instead provides perspective, clarifies, and empowers. Suddenly, that workplace drama or Twitter beef reveals itself as the cosmic irrelevance it always was. “It’s all dust,” Ferriss said. “Nobody gives a fuck.”

Ryan Holiday put it even more directly in his exploration of Stoic practices: “Meditating on your mortality is only depressing if you miss the point. It is in fact a tool to create priority and meaning.”

The ancients knew this. Emperor Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

But here’s what Ferriss, Holiday, and the Stoics are really pointing to, and what that moment on Flight 447 made visceral for me: Death isn’t the enemy. It’s the life coach you desperately need but never, ever, ever wanted to hire.

Befriending your mortality

Ernst Becker won a Pulitzer for The Denial of Death by arguing that human civilization is essentially an elaborate defense mechanism against our awareness of our own mortality. We build monuments, chase achievements, create legacies to somehow convince ourselves we’ll find a way to overcome the one thing guaranteed by our biology.

This denial drives what Becker calls our “immortality projects,” the ways we try to ensure that our existence will echo beyond our inevitable end.

For me, it was the 4.0 GPA, the PhD, the six-figure consulting gig. For you, it might be the IPO, the bestseller, the perfect family photo that gets 500 likes. We’re all running toward some imagined future, achievement, or trophy that grants us immunity from dying. We’re scrambling to find the thing, and we’re scrambling to get the thing, and we’re scrambling to hold onto it forever.

We don’t have to do that. This shift from seeing death as the enemy to recognizing it as a clarifying force has been gradual for me: years of Stoic practice, meditation, and simply observing life unfold around me. People in my life dying, some way too soon. People diagnosed with long-term illnesses. These are consistent, regular reminders that life is a finite, non-renewable resource.

The irony is that befriending death doesn’t make life feel shorter or scarier. It makes it feel more vivid, more precious, more worth living authentically rather than performatively.

When you truly internalize that you could leave life right now — not as some abstract philosophy but as lived reality — several things happen:

1. Your real values emerge from the noise. Suddenly, being seen as successful matters less than actually connecting with people you love.
2. Fake urgencies reveal themselves. That ASAP email? Unless someone’s actually dying, it can wait.
3. Your tolerance for BS approaches zero. Life’s too short for meetings that should have been emails or relationships that drain more than they give.
4. What actually matters becomes blindingly clear. Hint: It’s usually much simpler than your brain wants to believe.

The 90-year-old test

Here’s an exercise I give to every coaching client as we start our work together. It never fails to cut through the complexity we create around our lives:

Close your eyes. Fast-forward to age 90. It’s a Tuesday, and you’re sitting on a porch (because apparently all 90-year-olds have moved south and have porches in our imagination). What’s true about the best version of this moment?

When I do this exercise, the picture that emerges is remarkably simple:

• I’m healthy enough to move around and be active.
• I’m surrounded by people and family I love.
• I’m still sharp enough to write, teach, and serve others.

That’s it. That’s the whole list.

Notice what’s not there? The size of my bank account. The prestige of my job title, the number of LinkedIn followers, whether I ever gave a TED talk. None of it makes the cut when you’re staring down the barrel of your own mortality.

This isn’t about having low ambitions — it’s about having accurate ambitions. When you know how your story ends, you can work backward to figure out what actually matters now.

The 90-year-old test is where I start my values work because it’s the only perspective that can’t be fooled by short-term thinking or social pressure. Your 90-year-old self doesn’t care about inbox zero or Q3 targets. They care about whether you were present for the people who mattered. They care about doing work you find meaningful. And they care about not dying with a life unlived.

Practical memento mori

Here are a few more concrete practices that bring death’s clarity into daily life:

• Write your own eulogy. Many people have heard of this, but I recommend writing two versions: Write the eulogy for if you died today, and then write the one for if you lived a life aligned with what truly matters to you. The gap between them is the work for you to do and the places for you to focus.
• The deathbed story filter. Before any major decision, ask: “On my deathbed, will I regret not doing this, or will I regret the things I sacrificed to do it? What’s the story I wish to be able to tell about this when I’m dying?” This question has helped me see through superficial achievement traps and, on the other side, has helped me choose the short-term painful thing that benefits me in the long term.
• Study the stars and get outside. Adapting Ferriss’s advice, go outside at night and look up. Find a star. Consider that its light traveled years to reach you, meaning the star itself might already be gone. Find ways to be in grand scenes in nature. Find places that bring you awe. Let that cosmic perspective shrink your problems to their actual size.

Here’s what nobody tells you about memento mori: It’s the ultimate productivity system. Not productivity in the mercenary sense of cramming more into less time. But productivity in the truest sense: producing what matters, eliminating what doesn’t.

When you truly grasp your mortality:

• You stop procrastinating essential conversations.
• You quit optimizing systems that optimize nothing meaningful.
• You delegate or delete those many trivial tasks to focus on the vital few.
• You stop trading time for money once you have “enough.”
• You start creating things that might outlive you in valuable ways.

After that flight to Orlando, I noticed immediate changes. Emails that would have sent me into an hour-long response spiral got two sentences or silence. Arguments that would have escalated got met with a, “You might be right” or “This isn’t worth our energy.”

I began to understand what Becker was really saying: We’re all going to die, and no amount of achievement can change that. Instead of this being depressing, I found it liberating.

But the biggest shift? I started prioritizing shared meals with loved ones as if they were board meetings with God because, from the perspective of mortality, they basically are.

When you stop trying to outrun death through achievement, you can start using your limited time to contribute something meaningful. The question shifts from “How can I matter forever?” (an absurd exercise likely to lead to shallow, inauthentic answers) to “How can I matter right now?” (a powerful question for finding compassionate action to make the world a little bit better around you, in this moment).

Your mortality, your mentor

As I write this, I’m thinking of my uncle Ward. A kind, lovable, and humble man, he was an example to all who met him. He passed, far too soon, in August 2023, after a horrific battle with throat cancer and Crohn’s disease that meant he could not eat and barely speak for months. He was far too gentle, too kind, too good to have deserved a fight I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

And yet, even as he lost weight and even when words became too painful to form, my uncle still showed up for his family, managed to communicate love through presence alone, and found ways to express care even as his body betrayed him.

I remember how he’d text me about the latest Cubs game or to share the latest news on my one friend who made it to the MLB. For anyone he knew driving to or from Chicago, he would be checking the weather for them, letting them know the forecast and the ideal driving windows to avoid the worst of it. And there was nothing any of his many nieces or nephews could accomplish without my uncle Ward being one of the first to congratulate them for it.

By remembering him, I remember to live. I remember how he loved his family and his friends. I remember the generosity of his spirit, being the first to serve charity, to leave behind a bigger tip, to congratulate someone on their latest accomplishment.

My uncle can no longer do those things on this earthly plane. But I can. This is the paradox of memento mori: The more we remember death, the more fully we live. The more we befriend mortality (our own or the people in our lives), the less it controls us.

Admittedly, this embrace feels weird. But death is the feature of our existence that makes life meaningful. Without scarcity, there’s no value. Without endings, there’s no urgency to begin. And without mortality, there’s no reason to choose what matters over what’s merely urgent.

So I’ll ask you what I asked myself on that turbulent flight: Are you ready? Are you good with your people? Have you said what needs saying, done what needs doing, loved who needs loving?

If not, what are you waiting for?

Death is waiting to help you figure out what actually matters. All you have to do is listen.

This article Why memento mori is the ultimate life hack is featured on Big Think.

Near the end of my second year, my PhD supervisor delivered the news: They weren’t going to have funding for me anymore. Not an ideal start to a Tuesday morning. 

However, I was already on a half-stipend anyway. I thought this was normal, so I did what I thought you were supposed to do: patch together a living and fit life in the cracks. I had a full-time job at the university as a project officer, plus five other side gigs. $42,000 needed; two semesters to cover. 60+ hours of real work. Get to the PhD in the off hours, the early mornings, the late nights, and the days we used to call weekends. 

Simple math, brutal reality. Six months in, I realized this was not normal. It was highly irregular and professionally questionable. The more conversations I had with university officials, the more people subtly (or not so subtly) suggested I extract myself from a relationship gone sour.

There was, however, a small complication. I was 4,000 miles away from home, with my immigration status hanging entirely on my student visa in Australia. If I lost my status as a student, I’d lose my ability to work and stay in the land down under. 

My PhD once seemed like this thrilling intellectual adventure. Now it was sapping my will to live. I questioned who I was and what I was good at to the point of existential depression. I wanted to quit. But deciding whether to stay or go felt like choosing between two futures I couldn’t see clearly. Searching for guidance, I stumbled upon someone who changed my approach entirely.

Annie Duke’s 2018 book Thinking in Bets introduced me to a seemingly counterintuitive concept: Instead of trying to predict whether staying or leaving would work out better, I needed to focus on making the best possible decision with the information I had, knowing I couldn’t control the outcome.

To be successful, I had to completely let go of whether finishing the PhD was the definition of success. 

Duke, a World Series Poker Champion with a PhD in cognitive psychology, calls this avoiding “resulting,” which is our tendency to judge the quality of our decisions based on how they turn out rather than on the process we used to make them. A good decision can have a bad outcome due to factors beyond our control, just as a poor decision can sometimes work out well due to sheer dumb luck. 

In other words, the dumbest boss you’ve ever had can sometimes turn up great results. The smartest person you know and love in your life can still get unlucky. It doesn’t mean the former was right, or the latter was wrong. 

Because Lady Fortune sometimes simply can’t resist putting her thumb on the scales, the key is to build an explicit, rigorous process for choosing our life’s most important decisions, regardless of what happens next.

This insight transformed my approach to the PhD decision at a time I desperately needed help. Instead of agonizing over an unknowable future, I could bring a structure and system to my choice: What were my real goals in the long term? What information did I have about the options before me? What were the likely scenarios and their probabilities? How do these choices align with my values?

It was my first encounter with something most of us never explicitly learn: decision-making as a teachable, improvable skill.

The missing curriculum

“There are only two things that determine how your life turns out,” Duke tells Big Think. “One is luck, which we don’t have any control over. And second, where you land in that range of possible outcomes is going to be determined by the quality of your decisions. The quality of your decisions determines, in large part, the quality of your life.”

Duke should know. The former professional poker player turned decision scientist has spent decades studying choice under uncertainty. After retiring from poker in 2012, where she earned millions and a World Series bracelet, she’s devoted herself to understanding why smart people make systematically poor decisions and what we can do about it.

Her conclusion is simple, even if difficult in practice: Decision-making is a learnable skill with frameworks and processes that can dramatically improve life outcomes. Yet most of us rely on gut instinct, endless deliberation, cognitive biases hardwired into our heads, or whatever haphazard approach we’ve cobbled together through trial and error.

“We spend a lot of time teaching kids trigonometry,” Duke says. “But if we’re going to start to dig into math, once we get past addition, subtraction, division, multiplication — how about just teaching people probabilities? Because the core of every single decision that you make is a forecast about the future.”

This insight led Duke and her husband to found the Alliance for Decision Education in 2014. What started as a small program provider has grown into a national organization that aims to establish decision science as a core educational competency for kids K-12, just as important to a child’s education as reading and math.

For adults, the skill of decision-making can be a blind spot. Unlike professional poker players, most of us lack frameworks for making choices systematically. Consider how we typically approach major decisions. We make lists of pros and cons. We seek advice from friends and family. We agonize over the choice, hoping that if we just think hard enough, the right answer will emerge. 

We rarely structure the decision systematically. We don’t often take the time or even possess the know-how to clarify our goals, estimate probabilities, consider opportunity costs, or set criteria for future evaluation. Which means even if the outcome turns out in our favor, we don’t understand why. We can’t replicate it. We can’t teach it to others. 

In many ways, if we don’t understand the mechanics of good and bad decisions, we give up control over our lives, always reacting and never truly choosing. 

We can do better. 

The persistence problem

One area where better decision-making frameworks could immediately help is recognizing when to change course. In other words, we need to know when to quit. 

Duke has identified a systematic bias in how we approach this choice because we are, quite frankly, terrible at leaving behind the things that no longer serve us.

“For most people over 25 who are professionals, they are too gritty,” Duke explains. “They’re sticking to things way too long.” She cites research from psychologist Angela Duckworth and her book Grit, which emphasizes the power of sustained effort and passion over time as key to success. Duke offers the other side of the coin: We also need to know when to walk away. We’ve been so thoroughly trained to value perseverance that we’ve lost the ability to recognize when persistence becomes counterproductive.

As journalist Sydney Harris once noted, “Perseverance is the most overrated of traits… beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.”

And yet every other aphorism in modern-day culture would tell you to stay in it, to grind, to gut it out. We stay in jobs that make us miserable just because we’ve invested so much time. We continue doomed relationships because walking away feels like admitting failure. Companies pour resources into failing projects because they’ve already spent so much money.

I’m no better here, perhaps particularly vulnerable to the “just work harder” mantras. In our conversation, Duke pulls apart one of my decisions to leave a previous job, showing that I could have (and probably should have) quit six months earlier. 

This is the “sunk-cost fallacy,” a well-established cognitive bias that describes our tendency to continue investing in something simply because we’ve already invested so much. I’ve come this far, you think, not remembering the Japanese proverb, “If you get on the wrong train, get off at the next station.” The time, money, and energy you’ve already spent are gone, regardless of what you do next. The only question that matters is whether continuing forward is the best use of your future resources.

A practical framework for tough decisions

Duke offers a practical framework to combat this tendency, drawing from best practices in decision research. 

When you first think about quitting something, ask yourself: “How long am I okay with the situation as it is? What is the deadline by which I need to make a decision?” This forces you to set a concrete date and timeline rather than indefinitely tolerating an unsatisfactory status quo. Coming from Katy Milkman’s work, a Professor at Wharton, these questions help us set up a pre-commitment, a wonderful tool in making better decisions and helping us to achieve our goals.

Next, we can engage in “mental time travel,” a concept from Hal Hershfield, a professor of behavioral decision making and psychology at UCLA. Imagine yourself at that deadline and ask: What would a good version of this situation look like? What specific signals would tell you things had improved enough to stay? And on the flip side, what would a bad version look like? What signals would confirm it’s time to go? 

Together, these signals become your “kill criteria,” which are specific, observable benchmarks that take the emotion out of the eventual decision. You’ve essentially created a checklist to tell you when you’re heading in the right direction or entering free fall as you move toward your chosen deadline. 

For example, when we revisited my decision to stay or go in a job, I looked at factors like the presence or absence of mentoring, professional development opportunities, and how I would have felt on a Sunday night heading into a week: full of excitement or full of dread?

But here’s where the framework gets particularly powerful: Duke then asks you to estimate the probability that the good version will actually happen.

As Duke explains, the act of clearly articulating what improvement would look like and then forecasting the likelihood of achieving it often reveals that it’s highly unlikely, or borderline impossible, to achieve. By making these scenarios explicit, pulling the plug becomes far easier.

Teaching decision-making

Duke’s work with the Alliance reveals what becomes possible when decision-making is treated as seriously as other core skills. The organization focuses on four key areas: recognizing and resisting cognitive biases, structuring decisions, thinking probabilistically, and applying rationality (while aimed at kids, and even though familiar with the subjects, I still found the explainer videos on YouTube to be insightful).

These might sound like advanced concepts, but Duke argues they can be taught to kindergarteners. “You can teach kids that they’re agents of their own decisions,” she says. “You can teach kids about exploring options. How do you explore options? How do you be a good guesser of how things are gonna turn out?”

For example, young students can learn to estimate probabilities by predicting outcomes of simple classroom scenarios or games, learning to revise guesses as new information arises. This builds both mathematical reasoning and metacognitive awareness.

The work has shown promising results. In classrooms where teachers implemented decision education programs, researchers observed improvements in math and science scores alongside reductions in disciplinary problems. When students learn to structure their choices systematically, it affects everything from homework habits to social media use.

But the implications extend beyond student outcomes. Duke sees decision education as fundamentally about expanding opportunity and agency, particularly for kids who might not realize the full range of paths available to them.

She shares the story of someone who told her he was deeply invested in sports as a young person but didn’t realize until much later in life that there were ways to make a living in sports beyond being an athlete. “This ability to say, what are my options? How do I explore those? If we can teach kids to better structure decisions, the likelihood that they end up on a better path increases.”

A society of better choosers

The vision Duke describes is a society more comfortable with uncertainty, more willing to change course when evidence suggests a different direction, and less trapped by sunk costs and identity protection. In an era when career paths are less predictable, the ability to make good decisions under uncertainty seems increasingly valuable. 

“If more people adopted this ‘prove yourself wrong’ mindset, how would that change our workplaces? Our politics? Our relationships?” Duke asks. The potential transformation is profound: organizations that update their strategies based on evidence rather than protecting past investments, political discourse focused on accuracy rather than being right, relationships that can navigate change rather than clinging to what was.

The choice to choose better

Duke’s frameworks didn’t tell me what to decide about my PhD program — they helped me determine what was possible and what was likely. Some of it was a game of math, giving me a systematic way to approach the choice rather than relying on intuition and hope. More importantly, once the numbers cleared, her ideas helped me decide based on what I valued, as an informed decision. 

I did continue in the program, ultimately finishing with a clearer sense of what I wanted to do next. The funding crisis forced me to articulate my real goals and evaluate whether the academic path would achieve them. I knew I no longer wanted to stay in academia. Years of postdocs for an uncertain shot at tenure seemed like an incredibly bad deal. But the PhD offered more opportunities and opened more doors if I carried on. 

So I stayed — and finished. The irony isn’t lost on me that it took a crisis to discover frameworks that could have helped me avoid the crisis in the first place. But that’s exactly Duke’s point about the current state of decision education: We’re all figuring it out.

We teach reading because it unlocks knowledge. We teach math because it explains the world. Duke’s argument is that decision-making deserves the same priority, if not more so, as a practical, lifelong skill essential to personal and societal well-being.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate decision we all face: whether we’ll take control of how we choose.

This article When to quit: A simple framework for life’s toughest decisions is featured on Big Think.

When I left my job at Google, I told myself I was taking time to explore. But within weeks, I had jumped into building a startup — not because of a strong alignment, but because sitting in uncertainty felt impossible. So I threw myself at the first socially sanctified opportunity.

And for a while, it worked. I had a pitch deck, a plan, and a polished answer when people asked what I was building. But beneath that apparent clarity was a growing sense of disconnect between what I was doing and what actually mattered to me.

Eventually, the pressure to stay committed to a path that didn’t feel right became harder to carry than the uncertainty I had tried to avoid. My cofounder and I parted ways, and I finally allowed myself to ask what I actually wanted to explore next.

We often treat clarity as a sign that we’re on the right track. But not all clarity is made equal. Sometimes clarity unfolds gradually through curiosity, exploration, and reflection. Other times, it arrives too quickly, driven by anxiety, offering the comfort of certainty without real alignment.

What do we lose when we reach for clarity before we’re truly ready to find it?

Why we rush toward clarity

From a neuroscience perspective, uncertainty is not just uncomfortable — it can feel threatening. When outcomes are unknown, the brain’s amygdala activates, triggering stress responses similar to those caused by physical danger.

One psychological phenomenon that helps explain this reaction is cognitive closure, first observed by social psychologist Arie Kruglanski in the 1990s. It refers to our brain’s tendency to seek definite answers as quickly as possible, even if those answers are incomplete or inaccurate.

It’s a coping mechanism: a way to resolve ambiguity and restore a sense of clarity so we can feel safe again.

In the short term, anxiety-driven clarity soothes the discomfort of not knowing. But in the long term, it can narrow our thinking, reduce flexibility, and make it harder to navigate change. We overcommit to jobs and relationships that aren’t a good fit. We over-plan instead of experimenting. We confuse certainty with alignment.

How to avoid the clarity trap

Anxiety-driven clarity gives us quick answers, often at the expense of better ones. It offers relief, but not resolution. But the alternative isn’t indecision or confusion. It’s a different way of relating to uncertainty.

Curiosity-driven clarity emerges more slowly through exploration. It’s the kind of clarity that develops when we’re willing to not know for a while — to ask questions, to try different approaches, to observe the results without rushing to conclusions.

While cognitive closure shuts that window of exploration too early, curiosity increases our tolerance for prediction error: the gap between what we expect and what we experience. This increased tolerance gives us the flexibility to update our mental models, stay responsive to new information, and make better decisions over time.

So, how do we resist the urge to resolve uncertainty too quickly and instead learn how to stay with the questions a little longer? These three practices can help shift your relationship to uncertainty:

1. Name the tension

Simply labeling the emotion (“I feel anxious because I don’t know what’s next” or “I worry about the loss of income”) can help regulate your stress response. This technique, called affective labeling, activates the prefrontal cortex and gives you more space to respond and mindfully consider the challenge at hand.

2. Timebox uncertainty

Instead of rushing toward a clear answer, give yourself a defined period during which clarity is not the goal. Take a month to explore a question, a few weeks to run tiny experiments, or a set number of conversations to have before deciding. This timeboxed approach is easier to bear than indefinite uncertainty and can lead to better, more aligned decisions.

3. Capture your curiosity

Jot down exciting ideas and conversations that give you energy. These simple field notes build metacognitive awareness (understanding your own thoughts) and help you notice patterns of curiosity. Over time, those patterns can lead to a deeper sense of clarity and help you course-correct if you committed too early.

That startup I jumped into? It didn’t last. But it taught me something important: Clarity driven by anxiety rarely lasts.

The kind of clarity you can trust surfaces over time, often when you stop trying to force it and instead in the space created by curiosity.

So next time you find yourself in a moment of not-knowing, consider this: How can you stop chasing clarity, and instead make more room for it to emerge?

This article The hidden cost of chasing clarity is featured on Big Think.

A few years ago, I decided to retrain as a neuroscientist. It was a leap into the unknown — no roadmap, just a desire to grow. I chose to approach this time of change with curiosity, and I started a weekly newsletter to document what I learned. Suddenly, my doubts became fuel for discovery.

What I didn’t know at the time was that this systematic curiosity was actively reshaping my brain in ways that would build resilience for navigating future changes.

Curiosity is often treated as a personality quirk — something childlike and playful, maybe even optional. But neuroscience paints a different picture. When we’re curious, the brain’s dopaminergic system — the same one that lights up when we anticipate a reward — kicks into gear. Simply put, curiosity makes us feel good about the prospect of discovering something new.

It also helps us learn more efficiently, enhancing hippocampal activity and boosting our capacity to form and retain new memories. Studies show that when people are curious about a topic, they not only remember the specific information they were interested in but also retain unrelated material better.

Perhaps most importantly, curiosity promotes neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to new experiences. This makes it an ideal cognitive state for those inevitable moments of change when we need to break established neural patterns and form new connections.

Curiosity in times of change

Change, by nature, introduces uncertainty. And the human brain typically responds to uncertainty by activating the amygdala, triggering the same stress responses as physical danger.

What curiosity does is transform that uncertainty from a threat into an invitation.

First, curiosity increases our tolerance for prediction error: the gap between what we expect and what we actually experience. This makes us more flexible in our thinking, less reactive, and better at updating our mental models.

There’s also a balancing act happening between two major brain networks: The default mode network (associated with imagination and introspection) and the executive control network (responsible for goal-oriented behavior) often take turns.

Curiosity helps synchronize these networks, allowing us to envision possibilities while also taking action — the exact balance needed to navigate change.

Emotionally, curiosity can also act as a buffer. When we view an unexpected situation through a curious lens (“what can I learn from this?”), we are less likely to spiral into anxiety or avoidance. This cognitive reframe can dramatically alter how we experience the inherent uncertainty of change.

5 ways to navigate change with curiosity

Curiosity isn’t a fixed trait you either have or lack — it’s a cognitive skill that can be developed. Here are five ways to cultivate it, especially during times of change:

1. Ask “what if?” instead of “what now?”

Reframe fear-based responses with questions that invite exploration. Instead of “I don’t know how to handle this new role,” try “What if I approached this role as a learning opportunity?” This simple shift activates your prefrontal cortex rather than your amygdala, which will help minimize stress in times of change.

2. Take field notes

Pretend that you are an anthropologist studying your own life. Document what surprised you, what you don’t understand yet, or what made you pause during the day. Be specific: “Today I noticed X and wondered why…” This practice builds a curiosity habit and has the added bonus of creating a record of your learning journey.

3. Run tiny experiments

Want to switch careers? Interview one new person in the field every week for six weeks. Curious about writing? Start with a weekly newsletter for three months instead of a book. These tiny experiments will provide valuable data while helping you regain a sense of agency even when the path forward is uncertain.

4. Embrace not knowing

Practice saying “I don’t know yet” without immediately searching for an answer. Spend time exploring questions without rushing to conclusions. Research suggests that this enhances cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving — critical neural functions that support adaptation during transitions.

5. Treat failure as data

When something doesn’t go as planned, resist labeling it as a failure. Instead, treat unexpected outcomes as valuable information. By viewing setbacks as an inevitable part of growth rather than an indication of personal shortcomings, you can transform potentially discouraging moments into opportunities to learn.

It’s important to note that the brain’s capacity for curiosity fluctuates. The amygdala’s activity increases under stress, making curiosity harder to access precisely when it might be most beneficial. That’s why regularly practicing even small shifts in perspective can be helpful to train ourselves to re-engage the prefrontal cortex.

We often think of change as something to endure. But change is how we grow. Curiosity activates dopaminergic pathways, strengthens hippocampal function, improves memory formation, and increases prediction error tolerance, which enhances our capacity to navigate uncertainty with greater flexibility and less reactivity.

So, the next time you face a big change and feel anxious or stuck, try asking yourself a simple question: What if I got curious instead?

This article How curiosity rewires your brain for change is featured on Big Think.

I’ve been reading the obituaries for as long as I can remember. At first glance, they might seem like little more than a collection of dates and accomplishments. But for me, they’ve become a wellspring of creativity — each one a glimpse into a life I never would’ve imagined. And as decades of creativity research suggest, the most original ideas often come from the most unlikely sources.

That’s why one popular piece of advice for boosting creativity is to learn something new every day. But here’s the catch: This only works if that new information is very different from what’s already in your head. This is where most of our modern habits fall short. Internet searches, for instance, give you information that’s related to what you already know, or information that you’re already interested in. So, how do you escape that loop and stumble upon something unexpected, something you didn’t even know to look for? The obituaries, obviously — but I’ll come back to that.

In February, I interviewed Yoed Kenett, who studies high-level cognition and creativity, for my podcast “The Science of Creativity.” His research shows that creativity thrives on making connections between very different concepts. The core idea is simple: Our ability to create relies on prior knowledge, and our creative potential increases when that knowledge is organized into conceptual networks that help us search for, connect, and generate new ideas — what Kenett calls a “Google of the mind.”

This research goes back to the 1960s, when psychologist Sarnoff Mednick was studying patterns of thought in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was exploring the idea that highly creative individuals might share certain associative patterns with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, namely, the tendency to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. In a classic 1962 experiment, Mednick asked participants to say the first word that came to mind when they heard a prompt like table. Less creative participants tended to respond with obvious associations like chair or leg. The more creative participants gave those answers, too, but they also came up with more surprising ones, like food or even mouse.

Mednick’s observations led him to propose that highly creative people have a different kind of memory structure — one that holds a wider range of ideas and forges more unexpected connections between them. He called his theory the associative theory of creativity. His research showed that creative ideas are more likely to emerge from combinations of concepts that are further apart in the mind’s conceptual network. The greater the distance between two ideas, the more original and surprising their combination tends to be. More recent research, by Kenett and others, confirms these observations.

Some of the best-known stories of invention come from unexpected associations. Velcro, for example, was invented when George de Mestral was walking his hairy sheepdog through a field of burr-covered plants. It’s notoriously difficult to remove burrs from an animal’s hair, which means the animal is going to carry seeds a far distance, allowing the plant to spread more successfully. De Mestral took out a magnifying glass and saw very tiny hooks that clung to the dog’s hair. Then he made the distant connection: The burr’s mechanism, designed by nature to spread seeds, could be used to make a clothing fastener. There’s no shortage of other surprising inventions that began with distant connections: Post-It notes, the X-ray, shatterproof glass, the microwave oven, silly putty, heart stents.

The psychologist Dedre Gentner also found that the more conceptually distant two ideas are, the more creative their combination tends to be. For instance, she found that if you ask 100 people to imagine a chair combined with a table — two closely related items — most of them will picture something like a school desk. It’s an obvious match within the category of furniture. But if you asked 100 people to imagine a chair combined with a pony — very distant concepts — the results are far more varied and surprising: A chair you sit on while grooming a pony, one that a pony sits in, one shaped like a pony’s head, or one covered in fur.

Gentner calls this property mapping — when people borrow attributes like texture or shape from one concept and apply them to another. It’s a kind of remote association, and clearly more creative than imagining a standard school desk. But Gentner identified something even more powerful: structure mapping. This happens when you transfer the relational structure of one concept to another. Say you combine “pony” and “chair” and picture a chair shaped like a pony — that’s still property mapping, just more elaborate. But if you imagine a small chair, you’ve made a bigger leap. That’s structure mapping: drawing on the idea that a pony is smaller than a horse, and applying that relationship to redefine the size of a chair. These kinds of mappings — especially when the underlying relations are abstract or non-obvious — tend to produce the most original and surprising combinations.

You can strengthen your ability to make remote associations by exposing yourself to a wider variety of information, especially from conceptually different domains. Most of us stick to what we know. We don’t normally encounter distant concepts in everyday life, so stretching our minds into unfamiliar territory takes some effort.

Which brings me back to obituaries. I’m not talking about the half-page write-ups of celebrities or politicians. I mean the small-print obituaries in the New York Times Sunday edition — the ones squeezed into eight columns on a single page, paid for by friends and family. These people aren’t famous. But their lives, described lovingly and vividly by those who knew them best, are often more surprising than any headline obituary. And they’re an ideal way to boost your creativity.

It’s important to read all of the obituaries on Sunday. If you filter your reading by only choosing people who are like you, then you won’t be absorbing the most different, surprising new information.

Here are two that I read one Sunday morning recently:

Berta Escurra was born in 1924 in San Pedro de Lloc, Peru. She was a follower of British writer and spiritual thinker Rodney Collin when he moved to Mexico City in 1948. In 1963, she moved to New York City and founded the Spanish International Network (SIN) with Rene Anselmo. SIN was the first TV network in the U.S. to broadcast entirely in Spanish. Anselmo later went on to found PanAmSat, the world’s first private international satellite system.

Norton Garfinkle died on March 20, 2025 at the age of 94. Garfinkle was a professor at Amherst College and a serial entrepreneur. He founded a company that detected land mines for the U.S. and foreign governments. He invented a news database search algorithm and sold it to Reuters. He developed PLAX, the first pre-brushing dental rinse. He started Electronic Retailing Systems, which provided self-checkout systems to supermarkets. He started a company that published Lamaze Parent Magazine.

See what I mean about being interesting? You’ve probably never heard of either of them. (I hadn’t.) But reading their stories introduces you to a mix of fields — broadcasting, aerospace, esotericism, oral hygiene, database design, prenatal publishing — that you’d rarely, if ever, encounter all in one place. It’s exactly the kind of conceptually distant material that helps fuel creative thinking.

Here’s how you can use the obituaries to enhance your creative cognition.

It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.

Will any of the life stories you read cause you to have a surprising, creative insight? No one can say. But research shows that distant analogies often lead to creative breakthroughs, often in unexpected ways. What you’re doing is filling up your brain with a range of very different cognitive material.

In every person’s life story, there’s always a narrative, always a deeper principle at work. How did a woman from Peru get to Scotland, Mexico City, and then New York? How does a professor at Amherst College found so many different companies, with so many different technologies and within so many industries? Seek that deeper principle, ask “Why?”, and look for distant connections with your own life. Creativity is a daily practice available to anyone.

This article The creativity hack no one told you about: Read the obits is featured on Big Think.

The day I accomplished more in 6 hours than I had in entire weeks of work was the day I realized everything I knew about productivity was wrong.

During my PhD, I found myself working one full-time job plus five part-time gigs (bartending, TA for two classes, assistant for the HDR office, and, only in Australia, delivering the school’s tea service for longer classes) while studying full-time in order to raise $22,000 for one semester’s tuition. And I had two semesters left to go.

My schedule, unsurprisingly, was compressed to a breaking point. I would wake up early, work late after finishing one or more of my jobs, and weekend breaks were a myth.

The surprising part? In the mere 15 to 20 hours I had left for my PhD work each week, I was accomplishing twice as much as when I had 40+ hours available in the years prior.

Scarcity had created clarity. With so little time available, I became ruthlessly focused on what would move the needle. Everything else was stripped away. There was no time for second-guessing or procrastination — only the essential remained.

Saturdays became my heavy work day: Wake up at 7 a.m., meet my friend at the gym at 7:30, sit down for coffee, breakfast, and work at 9, knock out a few 120-minute focused sessions, change locations (I am a notorious café hopper) to keep it fresh, and usually end my day around 5 p.m. with an insane amount of articles read, notes written, and next steps laid out.

In contrast, when I first started the PhD and had all the time in the world to focus, I tracked my progress by counting deep work sessions — tallying each 25-minute focused block. At first, this input-focused approach helped build the focus muscle, slowly building to 90 minutes of pure, focused flow time.

But eventually, I had to ask: What was all this productivity actually producing? Sure, I was putting time on the calendar, but was I moving the needle? Was I actually getting closer to producing a written thesis?

The answers were all a resounding no. And it took adding 60 hours of real job(s) to my calendar to finally do something about it.

This is the hollow chase that traps so many of us: We optimize our systems, track our metrics, implement the latest productivity hack to pursue recognition — all while avoiding the harder question of whether we’re moving efficiently in the entirely wrong direction.

Now that I work in consulting, I find this focus even harder to maintain. Work, social life, identity, building my own business, and sales all blur together. The clear boundaries have disappeared, and with them, the clarity of purpose that had made those limited PhD hours so productive.

It’s not something that can just be fixed by “WORK HARDER!” As a former athlete, and since my earliest days of soccer, I knew how to push through pain and work. I knew how to grind. I can white-knuckle and throw long hours at a problem. But hours worked can’t solve everything.

This struggle illuminates something essential about real productivity: It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what matters.

Real vs. shallow productivity

“Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” — Tim Ferriss

Busyness as a badge of honor is bullshit. There’s a lot of work we can do simply to make people leave us alone. Work that looks impressive but doesn’t move the needle. Work that creates the appearance of productivity without the substance.

This was me early on in my PhD, attending workshops that had very little direct value to writing my thesis. This is every time you open your inbox, pretending to check emails in order to make it look like you’re doing something while at the office. In fact, part of why virtual work is effective is that it removes the need for this fake productivity virtue signaling.

That’s not fulfilling. That’s not energizing. That’s shallow, unnecessary shenanigans. Real productivity, by contrast, tries to tick as many of these boxes as possible:

• It’s aligned with our meaning and purpose

• It helps us grow and improve

• It allows us to reach deep levels of concentration (flow)

Sometimes you only get one. The holy trinity is when you can reach all three — what I call “Value-Aligned Productivity.” These are the supercharged hours where you accomplish in 60 minutes what used to take four hours, working at the intersection of flow, purpose, and mastery.

Value-Aligned Productivity means aligning your work with your core values at a time when you do your best work, creating a virtuous cycle where your actions reinforce what matters most to you, rather than depleting your energy on tasks that feel meaningless. Having just two hours of this type of work in your week can transform your experience from good to great. Having one hour of this every day can absolutely change your life — creating momentum that ripples into all aspects of your work and personal development.

This is where our values enter the equation. When I approach sitting down to write as something I have to do rather than a direct practice of my value of growth, in getting better at writing and documenting my own journey in order to better serve others, my relationship with the work transforms entirely. It becomes something I look forward to, not dread.

When the work aligns with what you truly value, the approach, the energy, and ultimately the output are fundamentally different.

Think about the last time you were so locked in on a task that time seemed to disappear. Maybe it was writing a report on a topic you found fascinating, perfecting a slide deck just so, or solving a complex problem about trying to sell to a specific client. That flow state didn’t stem from just “productivity” — it came from alignment.

The awareness connection

Awareness — that muscle we build through meditation, journaling, and mindful practice — is crucial to distinguishing real from shallow productivity. It gives us the “catch” for interrupting patterns that don’t serve us. We either:

1. Notice and choose our intention before approaching a task (“Even though this is a chore I dislike, I’m going to make it as enjoyable as possible,” or, “I’ll approach this meeting by dialing up my warmth and playfulness.”)

2. Notice what we’re bringing to the table during the task and choose a reframe (“I hate this; it’s pointless” becomes, “This is about integrity — I said I would do this, so I must.”)

One of the simplest practices is setting an intention before beginning work. “I’m going to do this as fast as possible.” “I’m going to approach this with humor.” “I’m going to pretend this is fun.” You find what you look for, so use intention to create a nudge back toward who you wish to be and how you wish to move through the world.

Without this awareness, you’ll find yourself grinding through tasks that drain your energy while wondering why you’re exhausted at the end of each day. Building that awareness not only helps you avoid shallow work — it also opens the door to deeper, more energized states of focus.

The flow-state checklist

Flow states are powerful indicators that you’re engaged in Value-Aligned Productivity. Research from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I dare you to try and pronounce his name) shows that people in flow states are up to five times more productive than when working under normal conditions, with neuroimaging studies revealing distinctive brain activity patterns during these peak-performance states.

Here’s what to look out for:

Typical work:

• You check the clock constantly
• Your phone becomes incredibly interesting
• You find excuses to take breaks
• Ideas come slowly, if at all
• You feel drained afterward
• You dread returning to it

Flow state work:

• Time seems to disappear
• You forget to check your phone
• You have to remind yourself to eat or take breaks
• Ideas come more easily than usual
• You feel energized after, even if physically tired
• You look forward to returning to it

The challenge in modern workplaces is that they’re often designed to inhibit flow. Open offices; constant notifications from email and messaging platforms, back-to-back-to-back meetings, and the expectation of immediate responses. It’s all a deep, full-fledged conspiracy against deep work. The enemy is inside the gates. The call is coming from inside the house.

The countermeasure? Establishing boundaries and rituals that create protected space for deep, meaningful work — and keep the noise of everything else at bay. Boundaries, like setting clear work hours or blocking uninterrupted focus time on your calendar, put the right choices on autopilot and remove daily friction. Rituals, like starting a deep-work block at the same time every morning, turn those choices into habit and build momentum over time. 

It’s not about doing more. It’s also not about creating an overly rigid schedule that prevents you from shifting your time and focus toward move-the-needle tasks when necessary. It’s about doing the right work, at the right times, for the right reasons.

Systems as servants

So, how do you get there? After years of experimenting with productivity approaches from authors like Oliver Burkeman, Cal Newport, James Clear, Charles Duhigg, Ali Abdaal, David Allen, and others (you name it, I’ve probably read it), I’ve distilled a set of principles that actually serve meaning rather than just efficiency.

These are systems designed to be servants to your purpose, not masters of your time:

• Single-task. Multitasking is the enemy of depth. Choose one thing and give it your full attention. This isn’t just intuitive advice — it’s backed by science. Heavy multitaskers pay a “focus tax” for constantly switching between tasks compared to those who focus on one thing at a time. Put simply, people who believe they are “good multitaskers” are lying to you and themselves.

• Aim for deep work and flow. Structure your environment and time to minimize distractions and maximize your chance of entering a flow state. Turn off notifications, look at a blank screen, and lock the door to your office.

• Find your prime time. Figure out when you work best. We can’t always perfectly control our schedules, but we often have more influence than we realize. Wield it wisely.
• Track incoming tasks. Write it down. This gets things out of your head, and by seeing everything in one place, priorities often become clearer.

• Use the Pomodoro Technique. Start with shorter, focused sessions (the standard time is 25 minutes) and increase the length as you strengthen your focus.

• Work around people. This isn’t for everyone, but I thrive when working around others who are also working. Focusmate is a great online tool for this, where you jump on a virtual call and both work on your own thing. During my PhD, we did something called “shut up and write” that was incredibly effective. You can also ask a friend to jump on a Zoom call or meet at a café (my girlfriend and I call this “parallel play.”)

• Prioritize results over effort. Early on, progress is about volume: how many focused sessions you can complete each day or week. Reps build capacity. But over time, quantity isn’t enough. You have to focus on your output — what you’re actually producing that moves the needle. Without that shift, it’s easy to stay busy without making real progress.

• Start small and be consistent. Some people can jump in and go all-out right away. That might work for you, but it’s rarely sustainable. What works better is the ramp-up. With Pomodoros, for example, set a goal for your ideal duration and total number of time blocks, and gradually build up to that.

The path forward

I still think about that period during my PhD — when financial pressure forced me to compress 40 hours of work into 15, and somehow doubled my output in the process.

The scarcity that once forced clarity can be recreated by choice. The boundaries that once felt like limitations can become the very structure that liberates you to do your best work. What initially felt like a crisis became my greatest teacher for what work actually matters.

These systems aren’t just productivity tricks. They are unique, personal expressions of a deeper philosophy that prioritizes your alignment over sheer volume of ‘production’. When we step back from both the hustle culture and the work-less movement, a more nuanced approach emerges.

In the productivity conversation, most voices fall into one of two camps: the hustle-harder crowd promising that sleeping four hours a night is the secret to success, or the work-life balance advocates suggesting that the key is doing less.

Value-Aligned Productivity offers a third path — one that focuses not on how much you do, but on the alignment between what you do and who you are, and holding you to account for doing work on what you decide matters.

Where will you start?

This article How losing all my free time forced me to rethink productivity is featured on Big Think.

The living room. I sat down on the couch, hands waving as I explained my PhD funding dilemma to my parents.

“So that’s where I’m at,” I concluded, gesturing with my glass. “I’m trying to decide whether to transfer programs or walk away entirely.”

My mother tilted her head slightly. My father cleared his throat.

“Remind me again,” he said, his voice careful, measured. “What exactly is your PhD about?”

The glass stopped halfway to my lips. Time seemed to freeze as the question hung in the air between us. What is your PhD about? From anyone else, it would be a straightforward question. But from my parents — the people who had raised me, who had been hearing about my doctoral studies for two and a half years, who knew I was working six different jobs while studying full-time after my promised funding disappeared — it felt like betrayal.

My chest tightened. I placed the glass down carefully, though my instinct was to slam it. How could they not have been paying attention, especially at this crucial moment when I needed their guidance most?

“Behavioral science,” I said flatly. “Studying how people change their behavior, working with farmers on the decision to adopt sustainable agriculture, and why they might resist.”

But inside, a storm was brewing. My thoughts raced to all the terrible stories I’ve always told myself: They don’t care. They haven’t been listening. They’ve never really understood me. I’m completely alone in this. My mother must have noticed something in my expression. She reached toward me, but I shifted away slightly, standing up to refill my water.

Twenty minutes later, as we moved to the living room, something unexpected happened. The tightness in my chest had dissolved. The anger had vanished.

Instead, I felt a sense of clarity washing over me — and with it, a surge of love and appreciation for my parents stronger than ever.

What happened in those twenty minutes? I realized three essential truths that marked my transition into actual adulthood. 

First, my parents didn’t know the details of my PhD, not because they didn’t care about me, but because they only cared about me. They weren’t interested in the academic particulars—they were interested in whether I was okay, whether I was growing, and whether I was becoming who I wanted to be. If I were doing what I needed to do, that was enough for them.

Second, even if my parents somehow knew everything about behavioral science, the politics of academia, and had both secretly completed their PhDs when I wasn’t looking, it wouldn’t have mattered. Because at 27 years old, I stood before a decision that would define my life’s direction, and I alone had to own that choice.

And finally, the most liberating realization: I didn’t want them to save me. I didn’t need them to. I had everything I needed to make this call, and while that didn’t mean it was easy, I wanted the power to choose my path.

My compass was within me all along. The fact that I could recognize this — that I was prepared to trust my own internal compass — was itself a testament to their parenting. At every turn, my parents have encouraged my siblings and me to make our decisions and own the consequences of them.

In that moment in the living room, when I decided that not only do I choose, but I actually have to choose forever going forward, I became an adult in the truest sense.

For some people, this moment of internal authority happens earlier. For some, it never occurs at all. Having now worked with hundreds of leaders at the world’s most prestigious organizations, I can tell you that the number of adults in the room rarely equals the number in attendance.

Those who know who they are — and what they truly value — refuse to compromise their authentic direction to placate others, and embody the “I choose” energy. These people are rare and immediately recognizable.

Their internal compass points to their true north, regardless of who’s watching.

Why we get lost

We live in a culture obsessed with success. From our earliest years, society hands us a map for success — prestigious schools, lucrative careers, impressive titles, material acquisitions — without being taught how to read our own internal compass.

High-school Danny believed success meant an Ivy League degree, a professional soccer career, financial security, and shelves lined with impressive books. College Danny, though not at an Ivy, thought a PhD represented the pinnacle of achievement as my guaranteed path to respect, opportunity, and yes, even more books. PhD Danny became desperate to escape academia, convinced that a six-figure consulting salary and teaching executives would finally bring fulfillment. And books.

You can probably see where this is going. I secured the consulting job and the six-figure salary. And far too quickly, I found myself wondering why, yet again, I did not feel fulfilled. This pattern — achieving external markers of success only to find emptiness — isn’t unique to me.

All of us could name people in our lives who achieved everything society values — wealth, status, power — and yet remain deeply insecure, perpetually restless, and profoundly unhappy. 

The reality is stark but liberating: Resume achievements cannot equal lasting satisfaction. They were never designed to. Our brains evolved with a negativity bias — a survival mechanism that’s always scanning for the next challenge or threat, often leaving us mired in perpetual dissatisfaction. Research in behavioral science shows this neurological treadmill consistently returns us to our baseline happiness regardless of external achievements.

Meanwhile, our culture has amplified this dissatisfaction by over-emphasizing measurable accomplishments, from IQ tests to college admissions, creating a pressure that now begins in kindergarten.

What does this mean for you? It means it’s harder than ever to determine what your version of success actually looks like. The measures we’ve been told matter — explicitly or unconsciously — are largely misaligned with genuine fulfillment. There’s too much noise drowning out your internal signals.

The true cost of misalignment

We often discuss the consequences of misalignment in dramatic terms — midlife crises, burnout, existential despair. But the daily cost of following someone else’s map rather than your own compass is far more insidious.

It’s the Sunday-night dread that settles in your stomach as you contemplate another week at a job that looks impressive but feels meaningless. It’s the reflexive comparison when you hear about a friend’s promotion, followed by the immediate question: “Do I want that too? Should I?” It’s the curious way accomplishments evaporate from memory almost immediately — the promotion, award, or milestone that was supposed to feel significant somehow doesn’t register emotionally.

It’s the constant internal dialogue full of “I should” rather than “I want” or “I choose.”

These are the subtle manifestations of compass interference — creating a constant low-grade anxiety that many high-performers have simply accepted as normal, like background noise they’ve stopped noticing.

When you allow external interference to redirect your compass, two losses occur. 

First, you shape-shift to fit into a box of someone else’s design. You cram yourself into a shape because of what you imagine others want from you. I watched myself become increasingly concerned with fitting in rather than asking, “What do I actually want here?”

Second, you gradually lose the ability to hear your own internal signals. Like a muscle that atrophies from disuse, your capacity to discern what genuinely matters to you weakens over time. The noise drowns out the signal until you no longer remember what your own true north feels like.

The combined cost is a life lived inauthentically — a draining, inefficient, and ultimately unsatisfying way to move through the world. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, where each decision unaligned with your values takes another small slice of your vital energy.

Even worse, if you do not figure this out — if you do not discern what it means for you to live a life of meaning —  you will reach the end of your life. You will face that moment alone with your thoughts. Only you will know if your life felt meaningful, if it was filled with love, if it made a difference. 

This is why defining your personal scorecard isn’t optional — it’s the difference between a life of authentic fulfillment and dying hollow and full of regret.

Don’t do that. Contrast this with compass-aligned living — the state where your actions and choices follow your internal direction rather than external maps. This creates a positive feedback loop, an eternal engine generating its own momentum. When you’re aligned with your compass, energy expands rather than contracts. Obstacles become interesting challenges rather than draining barriers.

This can sound cliché. It can sound unrealistic. After all, we have bills to pay, responsibilities to manage, and sometimes we simply need to adapt to circumstances beyond our control. And yes, there will be seasons when compromise is necessary — where your compass points one way while your current reality demands another path temporarily. But even in these periods of compromise, your internal compass remains intact.

You already know what you truly want and need. It’s carried within you — in your unique disposition, your natural inclinations, the things that genuinely light you up when no one’s watching or measuring, the presence you bring to every room you walk into.

You just need to listen closely enough to hear it. You need to quiet the external noise to discern it. You need to do the inner work of separating what’s authentically yours from what you’ve been told to want.

It’s never too late to begin this work. It’s never too early to start. And it’s always worthwhile to revisit and refine as you grow.

Calibrating your compass: Finding true north

So, we’ve identified the interference and recognized its cost. Now comes the essential question: How do you work with your compass to find your true north?

In its simplest form, this means identifying what you truly value — not what you’ve been told to value, not what looks good to others, but what matters deeply and authentically to you. It means taking the things you believe to be sacred and being willing to sacrifice for their pursuit, protection, and power.

In an interesting bit of trivia, “sacred” and “sacrifice” share the same Latin root: sacer, meaning “holy.” (Don’t worry, I’m not converting anybody here.) This matters because you show what is sacred to you by what you’re willing to sacrifice for it.

If I value growth, I show it by what I give up for it (moving halfway around the world away from friends and family for seven years), not by what I say. If I value my family, I show it every time I fly to see them for the events I wouldn’t trade the world to miss. If I value integrity, it means there is no amount of money people could give me for an action that sits outside of who I am.

If you’re not willing to give anything up for something, it isn’t truly a value — it’s a preference. And if you can’t explain why you value this thing, that value isn’t yours, it’s somebody else’s.

My own journey of calibrating my compass wasn’t instantaneous. It unfolded through years of reflection, values exercises, coaching conversations, meditation, and honest self-assessment. What has emerged is the start of something uniquely mine — a Danny Kenny compass that no one else could have calibrated for me.

And there are actions you can take now to start living a life more aligned.

The process begins with identification. Looking at a comprehensive list of values, start by circling the 8 or 10 that resonate most strongly.

Then comes the challenging part: narrowing that list to 3 or 4 core values. This constraint forces clarity and prevents the “everything is important” trap. If you value 10 things, you actually value nothing.

(Note: How you define these values can be unique to you. I value learning and curiosity, but in my compass, these fall under the broader direction of “growth.” I value connection and service, but these align under my commitment to “leadership” as I define it. You can move things underneath a “master” value.)

The key is identifying what you genuinely value, not what you think you’re supposed to value. This requires ruthless honesty and careful examination. If you say you value “health” but your underlying motivation is appearance or social approval, then your true value might be “confidence,” not health itself.

You know you’ve identified a true compass direction when no external reward could persuade you to abandon it, and no external pressure could force you to compromise it. Test your values with these questions:

• Would you maintain this value even if it cost you financially? 
• Would you hold to it even if it made you socially unpopular?
• When was the last time you sacrificed something for this value?
• Can you identify specific decisions you made because of this value?

For me, this calibration process revealed that my compass consistently points toward growth and integrity. Growth means constant evolution, learning, and development — both for myself and others. Integrity means wholeness, alignment between inner and outer, and the courage to do what’s right even when it’s difficult.

Once identified, these compass directions simplify decision-making tremendously. When faced with choices, I ask whether an option will facilitate growth and whether it aligns with integrity. If both answers are yes, my path is clear. If either is no, I know I’m being pulled off course.

This clarity doesn’t mean the path is always easy. Following your own compass often means departing from well-worn trails and familiar landmarks. It means disappointing people who expected you to follow their maps, and being ok with their negative feelings about it. It means embracing uncertainty.

But the alternative — continuing to follow directions to someone else’s destination — guarantees arrival at a place that wasn’t meant for you. Regular recalibration is essential. Notice where you’ve made choices based on external expectations rather than internal alignment. Be gentle with yourself when you discover you’ve gone off course — the goal isn’t perfect navigation but gradual improvement in reading your own signals.

This process isn’t about rejecting all external input. Other people’s maps can provide useful information about terrain and potential paths. The key difference is that YOU decide which direction to take, based on your own internal compass rather than external pressure.

Finding your travel companions

Once you’ve begun following your internal compass, you’ll notice something surprising: The journey becomes less solitary. Just as my parents supported my independent decision-making (even when they didn’t understand the specific details), you’ll need people who support your authentic direction.

One of the most powerful aspects of compass-aligned living is that it naturally attracts others on similar paths. When you begin navigating by your authentic values, you draw in people who resonate with that authenticity and repel those who are threatened by it.

In my own life, the relationships that have sustained me through this journey haven’t been based on shared credentials or professional affiliations, but on shared commitment to living purposefully and authentically. These connections provide both support and challenge — they celebrate when my actions align with my compass and gently question when I veer off course.

These traveling companions aren’t necessarily headed to the same destination as you. They might value completely different things. What connects you is not the direction of your compass but your mutual commitment to following your own true north rather than society’s prescribed routes.

To find these companions, two things you can do: Ask deeper questions in conversations, moving beyond resume exchanges to values exchanges: “What’s been most meaningful in your work recently?” or “What do you love about what you do?” instead of “What do you do?”

Create spaces for authentic conversation — dinner gatherings where phones are put away, walking meetings where nature slows the pace, or regular check-ins with trusted friends where you can all speak truthfully.

The unexpected benefit of finding these connections is that they serve as mirrors, reflecting back both your alignment and your blind spots. They help you calibrate your compass more accurately through their observations and questions. These relationships provide companions who care more about you staying true than reaching any particular destination.

That is priceless.

From calibration to navigation

The journey from external validation to internal alignment isn’t completed in a day, a week, or even a year. It’s an ongoing practice of listening to your signals, making choices aligned, and adjusting when interference pulls you off course.

This foundation — understanding what truly matters to you — is essential for finding your purpose and living an examined life of wisdom.

For now, your next steps are simple:

• Set aside 30 minutes this week in a quiet space with no distractions
• Identify three moments in your life when you felt most aligned—when your actions, your values, and your sense of purpose seemed perfectly in sync. These might be moments of achievement, but they are more likely moments of presence or connection that wouldn’t necessarily appear on a resume.
• For each moment, ask yourself: What values was I honoring? What was I creating or contributing? How did alignment feel in my body? These moments contain the first clues for your personal navigation system.

Remember: As you begin this calibration work, be patient with yourself, celebrate small course corrections, and trust that your authentic path will reveal itself through consistent practice and attention.

Your compass has always been within you. Now it’s time to learn to read it. The poet Mary Oliver perhaps captured it best when she asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

In that moment with my parents in the living room, I wasn’t just making a decision about my PhD — I was choosing my path based on what I care about rather than following someone else’s map. Your moment of choosing may look different, but the freedom it brings will be just as profound.

The answer won’t be found on anyone else’s map. It can only be discovered by following your own compass.

This article You’re not lost. You’re just following someone else’s map. is featured on Big Think.

In a 1979 study, cognitive scientists discovered something peculiar: When participants were asked to describe everyday experiences — going to the doctor, dining at a restaurant — they produced nearly identical responses. They followed the same sequences, listed the same steps, and expected the same outcomes.

Since then, research has revealed that these patterns extend far beyond everyday activities. We rely on deeply ingrained “cognitive scripts” not just for daily routines but for shaping our careers, relationships, and identities. While they can offer comfort, they also hold us back from reaching our full potential.

Conforming to scripts that aren’t ours

One of the most dominant cognitive scripts is the Sequel Script — the assumption that the next chapter of our lives must logically follow from the last. We stick to careers we no longer enjoy, remain in relationships that no longer serve us, and avoid exploring opportunities that seem inconsistent with who we have been. This self-consistency fallacy stems from our brain’s preference for familiar narratives — stories that make sense and offer direction, reassuring us that we are on the right track.

Another script that subtly governs our behavior is the Crowdpleaser Script. The pressure to conform to social expectations is powerful, often masquerading as wisdom or prudence. From an early age, we internalize socially-sanctified milestones — educational achievements, career ladders, relationship timelines. The desire to be validated by peers and family keeps many from taking unconventional paths, even when those paths are more aligned with our own definition of success (consider someone staying in a career they don’t enjoy just to satisfy family expectations).

The third one is the Epic Script, the belief that life should revolve around one grand purpose. The idea is seductive: Find the “one thing” that’s meant for us and dedicate our lives to it. Yet research suggests this thinking is flawed. Many who chase a singular passion become disillusioned when faced with setbacks, assuming they have chosen wrong rather than adjusting course. Others feel lost when they fail to identify a defining purpose at all. The truth is that most people are multipotentialites — curious, evolving beings with diverse interests. Embracing this fluidity can lead to a more fulfilling life.

How to break free from cognitive scripts

Cognitive scripts provide useful structure, especially for routine activities, but they shouldn’t define the course of our lives. Recognizing these unseen but ever-present cognitive scripts is the first step to breaking free from them. The key isn’t a dramatic overhaul, but rather a mental shift — replacing rigid expectations with an experimental mindset. By allowing ourselves to test new possibilities without the pressure of a fixed outcome, we open the door to a more aligned way of living.

One of the most effective ways to disrupt a cognitive script is to question its origins. Was a particular expectation taught by family, reinforced by culture, or self-imposed based on outdated beliefs? By examining our most obvious, seemingly natural ambitions, we can separate inherited influences from what truly matters to us.

To uncover a Sequel Script, someone might ask: Am I applying to this job because I could learn and grow or because it “makes sense” based on my previous job? For the Crowdpleaser Script: Am I pursuing this career milestone for myself or because I hope it will please others? For the Epic Script: Am I dedicating myself to this pursuit because it truly aligns with my interests or because I feel pressured to find my purpose?

Big life changes are intimidating, which is why many people remain tied to reassuring scripts. A powerful way to transition out of them is through small, low-risk experiments. Instead of quitting a long-term career overnight, try freelancing in a new field or taking a course. Instead of committing to a life-changing move, spend a few weeks in a different city. Experimenting with new ways of being allows for gradual shifts without the pressure of an all-or-nothing decision.

Cognitive scripts often come with predefined measures of success: promotions, financial milestones, social recognition. But these standards can be rigid and limiting. What if success wasn’t about ticking off traditional milestones but about lifelong curiosity, change, and growth? 

Breaking free from cognitive scripts is about unlearning what we’ve been taught to expect from ourselves. It’s about loosening our grip on the narratives we’ve internalized and letting go of the need for certainty and the default lens of traditional achievement. It requires the courage to question ingrained narratives, experiment with new possibilities, and redefine success on our terms. When we embrace this experimental mindset, we allow ourselves to build a life that’s aligned with our own evolving ambitions.

This article The 3 cognitive scripts that subtly rule our lives is featured on Big Think.

I.

The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. 

I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d “gotten the answer.”

Afterwards, he’d come out with three or four proofs of the same thing, plus some explanation of why each proof is connected somehow. In this way, he got a much deeper understanding of things than I did.

I concluded that what we call “intelligence” is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about “raw intellect.”

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince themselves of it, they won’t accept it.

Importantly, this is a “software” trait and is independent of more “hardware” traits such as processing speed, working memory, and other such things.

Moreover, I have noticed that these “hardware” traits vary greatly in the smartest people I know — some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, and readers, whereas others are “slow.” The “software” traits, though, they all have in common — and can, with effort, be learned. 

What this means is that you can internalize good intellectual habits that, in effect, “increase your intelligence.” “Intelligence” is not fixed.

II.

This quality of “not stopping at an unsatisfactory answer” deserves some examination.

One component of it is energy: thinking hard takes effort, and it’s much easier to just stop at an answer that seems to make sense than to pursue everything that you don’t quite understand down an endless, and rapidly proliferating, series of rabbit holes.

It’s also so easy to think you understand something when you actually don’t. So even figuring out whether you understand something or not requires you to attack the thing from multiple angles and test your own understanding.

This requires a lot of intrinsic motivation because it’s so hard; most people simply don’t do it.  

The Nobel Prize winner William Shockley was fond of talking about “the will to think”:

Motivation is at least as important as method for the serious thinker, Shockley believed…the essential element for successful work in any field was “the will to think”. This was a phrase he learned from the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and never forgot. “In these four words,” Shockley wrote later, “[Fermi] distilled the essence of a very significant insight: A competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands — he will lack ‘the will to think’ — unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts.” The discipline of competent thinking is important throughout life… (source)

But it’s not just energy. You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a lot. You have the drive, the will to know.

Related to this is honesty, or integrity: a sort of compulsive unwillingness, or inability, to lie to yourself. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said that the first rule of science is that “you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” It is uniquely easy to lie to yourself because there is no external force keeping you honest; only you can run the constant loop of asking, “Do I really understand this?”

(This is why writing is important. It’s harder to fool yourself that you understand something when you sit down to write about it and it comes out all disjointed and confused. Writing forces clarity.)

III.

The physicist Michael Faraday believed nothing without being able to experimentally demonstrate it himself, no matter how tedious the demonstration.

Simply hearing or reading of such things was never enough for Faraday. When assessing the work of others, he always had to repeat, and perhaps extend, their experiments. It became a lifelong habit—his way of establishing ownership over an idea. Just as he did countless times later in other settings, he set out to demonstrate this new phenomenon to his own satisfaction. When he had saved enough money to buy the materials, he made a battery from seven copper halfpennies and seven discs cut from a sheet of zinc, interleaved with pieces of paper soaked in salt water. He fixed a copper wire to each end plate, dipped the other ends of the wires in a solution of Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate), and watched. (source)

Understanding something really deeply is connected to our physical intuition. A simple “words-based” understanding can only go so far. Visualizing something, in three dimensions, can help you with a concrete “hook” that your brain can grasp onto and use as a model; understanding then has a physical context that it can “take place in.”

This is why Jesus speaks in parables throughout the New Testament — in ways that stick with you long after you’ve read them — rather than just stating the abstract principle. “Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” can stick with you forever in a way that “God watches over all living beings” will not.

Faraday, again, had this quality in spades — the above-mentioned book makes clear that this is partly because he was bad at mathematics and thus understood everything through the medium of experiments, and contrasts this with the French scientists (such as Ampere) who understood everything in a highly abstract way.

But Faraday’s physical intuition led him to some of the most crucial discoveries in all of science:

Much as he admired Ampère’s work, Faraday began to develop his own views on the nature of the force between a current-carrying wire and the magnetic needle it deflected. Ampère’s mathematics (which he had no reason to doubt) showed that the motion of the magnetic needle was the result of repulsions and attractions between it and the wire. But, to Faraday, this seemed wrong, or, at least, the wrong way around. What happened, he felt, was that the wire induced a circular force in the space around itself, and that everything else followed from this. The next step beautifully illustrates Faraday’s genius.

Taking Sarah’s fourteen-year-old brother George with him down to the laboratory, he stuck an iron bar magnet into hot wax in the bottom of a basin and, when the wax had hardened, filled the basin with mercury until only the top of the magnet was exposed. He dangled a short length of wire from an insulated stand so that its bottom end dipped in the mercury, and then he connected one terminal of a battery to the top end of the wire and the other to the mercury. The wire and the mercury now formed part of a circuit that would remain unbroken even if the bottom end of the wire moved. And move it did—in rapid circles around the magnet! (source)

Being able to generate these concrete examples, even when you’re not physically doing experiments, is important.

I recently saw this striking representation of the “bag of words” model in NLP. If you were reading this in the usual dry mathematical way these things are represented and then forced yourself to come up with a visualization like this, then you’d be much further on your way to really grasping the thing.

Conversely, if you’re not coming up with visuals like this, and your understanding of the thing remains on the level of equations or abstract concepts, you probably do not understand the concept deeply and should dig further.

I need all of NLP to be explained in this format pic.twitter.com/KYNQPTAQzB

— nicole ruiz (@nwilliams030) June 30, 2020

Another quality I have noticed in very intelligent people is being unafraid to look stupid.

Malcolm Gladwell on his father:

My father has zero intellectual insecurities… It has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he’s an idiot. He’s not in that game. So if he doesn’t understand something, he just asks you. He doesn’t care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question without any sort of concern about it… So he asks lots and lots of dumb, in the best sense of that word, questions. He’ll say to someone, ‘I don’t understand. Explain that to me.’ He’ll just keep asking questions until he gets it right, and I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. If my father had met Bernie Madoff, he would never have invested money with him because he would have said, ‘I don’t understand’ a hundred times. ‘I don’t understand how that works’, in this kind of dumb, slow voice. ‘I don’t understand, sir. What is going on?’

Most people are not willing to do this — looking stupid takes courage, and sometimes it’s easier to just let things slide. It is striking how many situations I am in where I start asking basic questions, feel guilty for slowing the group down, and it turns out that nobody understood what was going on to begin with (often people message me privately saying that they’re relieved I asked), but I was the only one who actually spoke up and asked about it. 

This is a habit. It’s easy to pick up. And it makes you smarter.

IV.

I remember being taught calculus at school and getting stuck on the “dy/dx” notation (aka Leibniz notation) for calculus.

The “dy/dx” just looked like a fraction, it looked like we were doing division, but we weren’t actually doing division. “dy/dx” doesn’t mean “dy” divided by “dx” — it means “the value of an infinitesimal change in y with respect to an infinitesimal change in x,” and I didn’t see how you could break this thing apart as though it was simple division.

At one point the proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus involved multiplying out a polynomial, and along the way you could cancel out “dy*dx” because “both of these quantities are infinitesimal, so in effect this can be canceled out.” This reasoning did not make sense.

The “proof” of the chain rule we were given looked like this:

(Amusingly, you can even get correct results using invalid mathematics, like this. Even though this is clearly invalid, it doesn’t feel far off the “valid” proof of the chain rule I was taught.)

It turns out that my misgivings were right, that the Leibniz notation is basically just a convenient shorthand, and that you more or less can treat those things “as if” they are fractions, but the proof is super complicated, etc. Moreover, the Leibniz shorthand is actually far more powerful and easier to work with than Newton’s functions-based shorthand, which is why mainland Europe got way ahead of England (which stuck with Newton’s notation) in calculus. And then all of the logical problems didn’t really get sorted out until Riemann came along 200 years later and formulated calculus in terms of limits. But all of that went over my head in high school.

At the time, I was infuriated by these inadequate proofs, but I was under time pressure to just learn the operations so that I could answer exam questions because the class needed to move on to the next thing.

And since you actually can answer the exam questions and mechanically perform calculus operations without ever deeply understanding calculus, it’s much easier to just get by and do the exam without really questioning the concepts deeply — which is in fact what happens for most people. (See my essay on education.)

How many people actually go back and try to understand this, or other such topics, in a deeper way? Very few. Moreover, the “meta” lesson is: don’t question it too deeply, you’ll fall behind. Just learn the algorithm, plug in the numbers, and pass your exams. Speed is of the essence. In this way, school kills the “will to understanding” in people.

My countervailing advice to people trying to understand something is: go slow. Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing. Start by thinking about the question yourself before reading a bunch of stuff about it. A week or a month of continuous pondering about a question will get you surprisingly far.

And you’ll have a semantic mental “framework” in your brain on which to then hang all the great things you learn from your reading, which makes it more likely that you’ll retain that stuff as well. I read somewhere that Bill Gates structures his famous “reading weeks” around an outline of important questions he’s thought about and broken down into pieces. For example, he’ll think about “water scarcity” and then break it down into questions like, “how much water is there in the world?”, “where does existing drinking water come from?”, “how do you turn ocean water into drinking water”, etc., and only then will he pick reading to address those questions.

This method is far more effective than just reading random things and letting them pass through you.

V.

The best thing I have read on really understanding things is the Sequences, especially the section “Noticing Confusion.”

There are some mantra-like questions that can be helpful to ask as you’re thinking through things. Some examples:

• But what exactly is X? What is it? (h/t Laura Deming’s post)
• Why must X be true? Why does this have to be the case? What is the single, fundamental reason?
• Do I really believe that this is true, deep down? Would I bet a large amount of money on it with a friend?

VI.

Two parables:

First, Ezra Pound’s parable of Agassiz, from his ABC of Reading (incidentally one of the most underrated books about literature). I’ve preserved his quirky formatting:

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches.

The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: “That’s only a sun-fish”

Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.”

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichterinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish. The student produced a four-page essay.

Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of the three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

The second, one of my favorite passages from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundredword essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.

She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.

He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five- thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

The point of both of these parables: nothing beats direct experience. Get the data yourself. This is why I wanted to analyze the coronavirus genome directly, for example. You develop some basis in reality by getting some first-hand data, and reasoning up from there, versus starting with somebody else’s lossy compression of a messy, evolving phenomenon and then wondering why events keep surprising you.

People who have not experienced the thing are unlikely to be generating truth. More likely, they’re resurfacing cached thoughts and narratives. Reading popular science books or news articles is not a substitute for understanding, and may make you stupider, by filling your mind with narratives and stories that don’t represent your own synthesis.

Even if you can’t experience the thing directly, try going for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts. On foreign policy, read books published by university presses — not The Atlantic or The Economist or whatever. You can read those after you’ve developed a model of the thing yourself, against which you can judge the popular narratives.

Another thing the parable about the bricks tells us: understanding is not a binary “yes/no.” It has layers of depth. My friend understood Pythagoras’s theorem far more deeply than I did; he could prove it six different ways and had simply thought about it for longer.

The simplest things can reward close study. Michael Nielsen has a nice example of this — the equals sign:

I first really appreciated this after reading an essay by the mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. You might suppose a great mathematician such as Kolmogorov would be writing about some very complicated piece of mathematics, but his subject was the humble equals sign: what made it a good piece of notation, and what its deficiencies were. Kolmogorov discussed this in loving detail, and made many beautiful points along the way, e.g., that the invention of the equals sign helped make possible notions such as equations (and algebraic manipulations of equations).

Prior to reading the essay I thought I understood the equals sign. Indeed, I would have been offended by the suggestion that I did not. But the essay showed convincingly that I could understand the equals sign much more deeply. (link)

The photographer Robert Capa advised beginning photographers: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” (This is good fiction writing advice, by the way.)

It is also good advice for understanding things. When in doubt, go closer.

Thanks to Jose-Luis Ricon for reading a draft of this essay.

This article How to understand things is featured on Big Think.

For most of my adult life, politics and public affairs were played between the 30-yard lines. As a lifelong Democrat and strategic communications practitioner, I’d often hear conservative friends and family members express grave concerns about Clinton or Obama threatening our national security and economy. Liberal friends voiced similar fears about both Bushes. These concerns seem almost quaint now. 

In the pre-9/11, pre-economic collapse world, you knew what leaders from both parties would do in a crisis. They would defend America’s interests, keep markets calm, and generally adhere to rules and decorum. Like football, politics was essentially a game of controlled territory acquisition — three yards and a cloud of dust, advancing methodically. 

This approach — careful, methodical, strategic — served its purpose in its time. It helped navigate complex policy challenges, build lasting coalitions, and maintain institutional stability. But in an age of unprecedented technological and social disruption, simply moving the ball methodically between the 30-yard lines is no longer sufficient. 

As Los Angeles burns in January 2025, we face a moment that demands more than careful advancement — yet reveals the dangerous void between tactical reaction and true strategic thinking. The challenge isn’t that leaders are throwing long bombs; some moments demand bold action. The problem is that these moves are increasingly driven by digital outrage rather than strategic vision. 

The game changes

Each viral moment demands instant response. A mayor’s airport silence becomes trending content. Conspiracy theories drive crisis management. Fire chiefs battle rumors on social media. Each tactical reaction creates new crises requiring more tactical responses. The game has fundamentally changed, but our approach to playing it hasn’t evolved — we’ve simply replaced methodical advancement with blind reaction. 

The pattern we have seen for most of the 21st century makes traditional political analysis feel inadequate. That’s why I began looking beyond conventional frameworks to understand our moment. What I discovered surprised me: The philosophers who grappled with humanity’s darkest hours — World War II, the Holocaust, profound social upheaval — weren’t just observing their turbulent era. They were providing frameworks for maintaining human purpose during times of fundamental disruption. 

Thinkers like Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Simone Weil understood something crucial about maintaining human agency amid chaos. Their insights speak directly to our current challenges with artificial intelligence, social transformation, and institutional breakdown. 

Digital age, timeless thoughts

This manufactured chaos isn’t accidental. Marshall McLuhan warned us decades ago that the medium itself would reshape how we think and act. He couldn’t have imagined social media algorithms and AI language models, but he understood something fundamental: New forms of communication don’t just carry messages — they transform the messenger.

As flames consume Los Angeles neighborhoods, we see this transformation in stark relief through what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls our “outrage society.” AI-generated images of the Hollywood sign in flames spread faster than actual fire. Political recriminations drown out strategic response. Each wave of digital outrage demands immediate reaction, leaving no space for strategic thinking or substantive action. 

Han argues that digital communication has led to the disintegration of community and public space, eroding our capacity for meaningful political action and discourse. Waves of outrage mobilize attention efficiently but lack the “stability, constancy, and continuity indispensable for civil exchange.” Lost in this digital chaos are the strategic questions that actually matter: How do we build institutional resilience? How do we balance development with climate reality? How do we maintain human agency amid accelerating crises? 

Think about how we respond to each new technological development. Whether it’s rapidly spreading misinformation about water supplies during fires or AI tools generating false crisis imagery, our reactions swing between blind panic and equally blind enthusiasm.

These aren’t just abstract concerns. We’re facing two existential challenges that share a common thread: the collapse of strategic thinking. On one side, we’re racing to implement AI and other transformative technologies without a clear vision of where we’re heading or why. On the other, we’re watching democratic institutions strain under populist pressure, responding to each crisis with tactical moves rather than strategic understanding.

The connection isn’t coincidental. Both challenges stem from our growing inability to see beyond the immediate, to understand complex patterns, and to think strategically rather than just react tactically. Whether it’s agencies creating multiple separate fact-checking websites instead of coordinated response, or institutions chasing viral moments rather than building public trust, we’re losing the art of strategic thinking just when we need it most.

Lessons from post-war thinking

While the urgency of today’s challenges may feel overwhelming, they are not without precedent. The post-war era, and the thinkers who addressed the massive societal changes the world was experiencing, may offer a model for how bold, strategic leadership can turn moments of profound crisis into opportunities for renewal.

Beyond immediate crisis management, LA’s challenges demand more than tactical reactions to viral outrage or misinformation campaigns. The city needs leadership with strategic foresight to rebuild, not just react — echoing lessons from another era of profound disruption. 

The Marshall Plan, forged in the wake of World War II, is often remembered as an economic recovery package. But its true power lay in its vision. American leaders didn’t just throw money at the ruins of Europe — they crafted a strategy that rebuilt trust, stabilized institutions, and fostered collaboration among deeply divided nations. They understood that to overcome despair and division, the solution had to go beyond immediate relief to lay the groundwork for long-term resilience.

This kind of renewal resonates deeply with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the mid-20th century. Arendt argued that true political action arises not from reacting to chaos but from the deliberate creation of new public spaces and institutions where people can come together to address shared challenges. She warned against the “rule by nobody,” a phenomenon where bureaucratic systems obscure accountability and leave people feeling powerless — a dynamic we see today in LA, where leaders are paralyzed by the pace of digital outrage and misinformation

In the face of the LA fires, these lessons are clear. The crisis isn’t just about extinguishing flames; it’s about reimagining how the city confronts its vulnerabilities. The challenge is to go beyond tactical firefighting — both literal and metaphorical — and take bold, strategic steps toward building a city that can withstand future crises.

• Foster collaboration: Just as the Marshall Plan required nations to set aside their differences and work together, Los Angeles must rally diverse stakeholders — government agencies, community leaders, and private industries — to develop a cohesive climate resilience strategy. This must cross city lines, and artificial divisions that are the relic of days gone by. 
• Rebuild public trust: Following Arendt’s call for public spaces, LA’s leaders should focus on creating forums where residents can meaningfully engage in decisions about their city’s future. Transparency and collaboration can counteract the alienation and distrust amplified by disinformation. The long-overdue effort to update the City Charter must address the needs of a county with over 10 million residents and finally eliminate the balkanized system of outdated city lines and fragmented municipalities. Now is the time to restore effective governance and build a structure that reflects the realities of today.
• Balance pragmatism with vision: Like the architects of the Marshall Plan, LA’s leaders must recognize that pragmatism doesn’t mean abandoning moral responsibility. Addressing the fires’ immediate devastation is critical, but so is investing in systemic changes — better urban planning, renewable energy infrastructure, and robust emergency management systems.

The Marshall Plan succeeded because it confronted existential despair with a vision of renewal, and Arendt’s philosophy reminds us that this vision must be rooted in collective action. LA has the opportunity to do the same: to lead not just in responding to a crisis but in demonstrating how cities can thrive in an era of disruption. 

Putting strategy first

In my political work, I watched as data analytics and instant polling began replacing the human insight that comes from understanding community dynamics and reading a room. In my strategic communications work, I’ve watched organizations rush to adopt AI tools without first understanding their strategic purpose. It’s like calling plays without understanding the game. 

But here’s the irony — and the opportunity. The very human capacity for strategic thinking that we’re in danger of losing is exactly what we need to address these challenges. Real strategy — the kind that comes from experience, insight, and understanding human dynamics — is what separates successful crisis response from digital chaos, and effective governance from populist reaction. 

What we need now isn’t just better plays within the old rulebook — or wild throws hoping for miracle catches. The game itself has fundamentally changed, and with it, our need for a different kind of strategic thinking. The methodical advances between the 30-yard lines might have made sense in a more stable era, but they’re inadequate for today’s challenges. At the same time, the reckless long-bomb approach — whether from populist politicians or tech billionaires casually disrupting democratic institutions — threatens to burn down the stadium itself. 

The strategic thinking I learned in those early campaign days wasn’t just about careful advancement — it was about seeing the whole field, understanding the human dynamics at play, and recognizing patterns that others missed. Today, as my city burns and institutions strain under multiple crises, we need this kind of strategic vision more than ever — not to return to some imagined past of political moderation, but to forge new paths that maintain human agency and purpose amid profound disruption.

The philosophers who wrote amid the chaos of the mid-20th century weren’t just documenting their moment. They were providing frameworks for navigating fundamental change while preserving what matters most. Their insights remind us that strategic thinking isn’t just a set of tactical tools — it’s a fundamentally human capacity that becomes most crucial precisely when the old rules no longer apply. 

Our challenge now is to cultivate this kind of strategic thinking before it’s too late — not to play between the 30-yard lines or throw desperate long bombs, but to reimagine the game itself while preserving its fundamental purpose: advancing human flourishing in an age of unprecedented change.

This article How to revive strategic thinking in an age of digital outrage is featured on Big Think.

In 1986, the USS Lexington aircraft carrier was operating at night in the Gulf of Mexico when it received a distress call from a U.S. Coast Guard dispatcher. A boat had capsized and up to 20 people were in the water, suggested an initial report. 

Aviation Rescue Swimmers Bill Gibson and Rick Williamson, plus their aircrew, launched from the USS Lexington in an SH-3D Sea King helicopter toward the area of interest. The crew rigged the cabin for rescue. 

Shortly after arriving on the scene and conducting a box search pattern, the left-seat pilot spotted a strobe light flashing a mile in the distance. The pilots approached a life raft with four souls on board, an unexpected sight given the initial intel. The pilots brought the helicopter to a 40-foot hover and lowered Gibson and Williamson into the pitch-black, high-sea state. The pilots then backed off the aircraft to provide space from the ferocious rotor wash for the swimmers to conduct their rescues.

After establishing communication and assessing the in-shock victims in the raft, the rescue swimmers towed the victims one at a time to the hovering SH-3D, hoisting them to safety. As Gibson pulled his final survivor into the circle of thrashing water beneath the helicopter, he gave a thumbs up for the crew chief to lower the rescue strop. At that point, he noticed the helicopter move away from him and his survivor. For a brief moment, he had no idea what was going on as he processed the possibilities. Was there an engine failure? Were they low on fuel? Was there a hoist malfunction? 

The horrified Gibson then turned to his left and saw the unthinkable. A 400-foot cargo vessel steaming straight toward them! Without hesitation, Gibson grabbed hold of his survivor and intensely began flutter-kicking to the right of the fast-approaching ship. They were both being sucked under the massive keel as he swam with all his strength. As the cargo ship plowed forward, it created a massive wake of waves, which the rescue swimmer fought with all his strength to prevent them both from being sucked under and crushed. After what seemed like forever, they finally reached the aft of the ship, where they could hear and feel the haunting, massive three-story-high propellers violently chopping through the night ocean. They were then uncontrollably pulled toward them as the rescue swimmer took a final breath of air and pulled the survivor underwater. 

Gibson frantically kicked deep down into the pitch-black ocean as the water-depth pressure crushed their ears. The deafening pounding of the propellers reverberated through the water. Amid the chaos, he remembered his life being eerily calm as he knew it wasn’t if, but when they would be hacked to pieces. He just kept kicking. He would never stop kicking. Then everything went completely silent and peaceful. They had both astonishingly made it down and under the cargo ship’s propellers. Moments later, they surfaced on the other side of death in the ship’s wake. They survived the impossible!

Aviation Rescue Swimmer, Bill Gibson, was in the right place at the right time to conduct a standard nighttime rescue. However, when the unthinkable happened he had a critical choice to make: When a barge was about to crush him and his survivor, he could have easily released the victim to save his own life. But he chose to do the right thing when it mattered most, never considering an alternative option. Even if that meant dying himself to save another. His unrelenting grit and ability to face his fears exemplify the rescue swimmer motto: “So Others May Live!”

Calm in the chaos

Have you been in the right place at the right time and had the opportunity to make the right choice? Did you make the right choice or did a barrier outside your control leave you paralyzed, unable to make a decision until it was too late? I’ve experienced every version of the above scenario. I’ve walked away proud of some decisions and carried shame for others. But in all my experiences, I’ve learned valuable lessons to help better shape my future. 

As a former US Navy Aviation Rescue Swimmer and Mount Everest solo summiteer, I’ve learned a few things about critical thinking, overcoming fears, and leaning into adversity. During my time served, I deployed twice to the Persian Gulf during Operation Southern Watch, flying countless mission sets. But it wasn’t until after my 2011 survival experience in the death zone, where I became completely snow-blind while alone on the summit of Everest, that I started some major self-reflection. 

My full experience is described in my book, Blind Descent: Surviving Alone and Blind on Mount Everest. The most common question I’ve been asked since that horrific event is how I didn’t panic at the top of the world. Besides a miracle from God, it really came down to my years of intense military training and experiences as an Aviation Rescue Swimmer. Our training taught us to remain calm in every situation, as panic kills. Every helicopter flight brought the possibility of facing our fears and overcoming unthinkable trauma. The few men and women who make it through the grueling training are expected to jump from a hovering aircraft into the unforgiving ocean to rescue panicked survivors suffering from shock — who often attack their rescuer, trying to use them as flotation. The Navy program has one of the highest attrition rates because most people aren’t wired to operate in such a chaotic and unpredictable environment.

A decade after my Everest climb, and repeatedly being asked the same question about my ability to remain calm, I decided to conduct some research and write another book, Calm in the Chaos: True Tales from Elite U.S. Navy Aviation Rescue Swimmers, focusing on the training and experiences of U.S. Navy Aviation Rescue Swimmers, like Bill Gibson and Rick Williamson. 

I also interviewed Aircrew and Aviation Rescue Swimmers spanning from the Apollo 13 astronaut extraction, Vietnam Combat Search and Rescue missions, Hurricane Katrina saves, rescuing the crew from a burning submarine, survivors of helicopter crashes, and so on. Through the unique training and experiences, I’ve extracted lessons, tactics, and mindsets that can directly transfer to people who are panicking in their own lives. (I’m also grateful to have my wife, JoAnna, contribute her wisdom and experiences as a Christian Counselor throughout each chapter to help soften the delivery of the applicable lessons.)

Stories like Bill Gibson’s represent extreme cases, but everyone can learn from and apply these lessons to their own lives where fear prevents us from moving forward. Those who have built grit into their normal lives can face difficult setbacks in life and choose to continue propelling forward. In hard times, it’s perseverance that gets you through. If you see quitting as an option then more often than not, that’s what you’ll choose.

Just like how the men and women rescue swimmers must deal with the chaos and unpredictability of harrowing rescues, we all have unique traumatic events at times in our lives. Things can be uncertain and there might even be chaos, but what we do in those adverse times predicts our mindset and ability to be resilient and come back stronger from life’s setbacks and learn from them. It’s not about if we fail or succeed, it’s about if we learn from the experiences to create a healthier approach to life in the future.

This article How elite rescue swimmers stay calm in life-or-death situations is featured on Big Think.

Katharine Graham became the CEO of the Washington Post Company – a major publishing business that owned radio and television stations, as well as Newsweek and the Washington Post – one summer afternoon in 1962, at the age of forty-five, when her husband shot himself. She had no idea what was going to happen. For most of her life, she had been so denigrated and mocked by her mother and husband that she lacked the confidence to dress herself for a party, let alone believe herself capable of running a major corporation. Despite the fact that her father had owned the Post, and nurtured her talent, she believed that running a business was never in her blood. She said that when she bought a house in her late twenties, she did not know the difference between income and capital. She was obsessed by news and politics but bored by advertising and balance sheets. And so, when she woke up from a nap that August afternoon to find her husband – alcoholic, manic depressive, adulterous, verbally abusive – shot dead, Katharine Graham faced a transformative moment. For the six months before Phil Graham died, Katharine had worried that he would take the Post away from her, after he started a bitter-minded legal attempt to take control of the company. In her grief, she faced a challenge. She could either run the business herself or let it go out of the family. She was advised to sell. She declined.

Katharine Graham went on to become one of the most successful CEOs of the twentieth century, and one of the few women of her time to hold so much commercial and political power.

To the people around her – and perhaps to herself – Katharine Graham’s success as a CEO came out of the blue. She had no training in business. She lacked confidence. But she had everything a late bloomer needs to succeed. She didn’t come out of the blue at all. She had just been overlooked. Her talents were always there, but they were unappreciated.

Katharine Graham never lacked the qualities she needed for success. What was missing was opportunity. In among the long years of self-doubt, there were many flashes of the steel, signals of the character that would later see her acclaimed as one of the most powerful people in Washington and one of the most successful CEOs in the United States, in whose company Warren Buffett confidently invested and whose salons became essential attendance for new presidents. From her abusers, she drew resilience. From her elite background she had acquired the skills for success. Circumstances that might have crushed other people didn’t quite crush Katharine Graham.

Graham’s story exemplifies many of the ways in which late bloomers flourish. Because she was a woman, she wasn’t going to be just given the opportunity to run the company. In a perverse, tragic way, she got a lucky break. But she was prepared to take that break. She was well educated, knew the newspaper business in detail, had been acquainted with the Post from her childhood. She was networked with the right people and learned from the good influences of her upbringing and education. Above all, she was resilient. Persistence is a perpetual theme of late blooming, and Katharine Graham persisted and persisted and persisted, no matter what. She shows us that simply deciding to act when faced with a challenge can reveal new depths of capability. The more she did, the more capable she became. ‘Do your work,’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘and you shall reinforce yourself.’

This book is going to examine the factors that made Katharine Graham – and others like her, in fields ranging from painting to entrepreneurship – a late bloomer, so that we can better understand what a late bloomer is and how we might find more of them.

Graham’s life pivoted on a single tragic moment. But she chose to make the switch, from one life to another. By deciding to own the Washington Post Company, rather than sell it, she chose to move from the drawing room to the boardroom. This wasn’t so much a transition as a translocation. It was as if Fate snapped its fingers and she found herself in strange new surroundings.

How then did she become one of the most successful CEOs of the twentieth century?

The answer can be found in a recent study of the careers of scientists, film directors and artists. This study, which was conducted by academics at Northwestern University, looked at hot streaks in people’s careers – intense periods of high achievement, lasting a decade or more. What conditions have to be present for a hot streak to occur? The study found that before the hot streak begins there is an exploration phase, when new ideas are gathered, which is followed by a period of exploitation, when those new ideas are turned into original and impactful work.

This is similar to the explore/exploit dynamic, an idea from computer science, which says that to make the best decisions we should find the correct balance between gathering information (exploring our options) and making the most of what we know (exploiting that information). To make the best decisions, we need to balance exploration and exploitation.

What the research on artists, filmmakers, and scientists found was not that either exploration or exploitation alone was critical to a hot streak: it was the transition from explore to exploit that mattered. Exploring before exploiting means you can discover the most productive ideas and expand your creative possibilities. What matters is the switch.

Too much exploration can be risky: you end up as a dabbler, a dilettante. Too much exploitation can be boring: you don’t discover enough new information to do interesting, original work. To have a hot streak, a burst of your best work, you need to switch from explore to exploit. Importantly, these findings were robust whether the hot streak came early in a career or late. You can make the switch later in your career and still see the same effect.

This broad pattern, of shifting from exploring to exploiting, can be observed in the lives of late bloomers.

Like Katharine Graham, most late bloomers go through these two stages. First, they take a long and winding road, an essentially unplanned career path. Then, they get the opportunity for success through some combination of the right people, the right place and the right time. Their network, the culture they move to, a personal transformation – or some combination of these – take the disparate experiences of the first stage and turn them into the focused output of the second stage. They make the switch from explore to exploit and enter a hot streak. They just happen to do it later than their peers.

Late bloomers rarely take conventional career paths to success; if they did, perhaps they would not be late. Their progress is punctuated and disrupted, not smooth and steady. In this stage, their careers are often either dormant or patchwork, made of seemingly disparate parts. This might look listless, directionless or inefficient: rather than working towards a specific goal, late bloomers prepare for the unknown, the unexpected, the unstated. As with the explore mode, this stage has many influences, and what eventually triggers their transition to success might not be the most obvious or most expected thing. The idea that gets exploited is rarely the most popular, mostly highly cited or most recently discovered idea. It’s the most interesting.

Second, late bloomers find their niche or opportunity – some turn in their luck, some discovery, some change in their circumstances comes along and makes them a channel for their talents. They get direction, focus, challenge, resources, support, opportunity. This is when they exploit the capabilities and preparation from the first stage. We shall see, again and again, the importance of preparing for your luck – chance really does favor the prepared mind.

This second stage has three conditions, which are not all present in all cases, but which are reasonably consistent: right people, right place, right time. To understand how late bloomers leave the long and winding road and arrive at the place where they achieve so much, how they switch from explore to exploit, we need to look at their networks, the culture they live and work in, and the transformational moments in their lives, or their crisis points.

What we will see is that weak ties – the phrase sociologists use to describe people we are only slightly acquainted with – are the people who can change our prospects, but only if they are influential. Good networking is not about knowing all the best people, but the few who can be credible and persuasive to the people we need to reach.

Personal transformation happens through cultural immersion, sampling the world and changing our surroundings. In new circumstances, gradually sampling our way into a new mode of thinking, living or working, we can change our opportunities, perhaps even change ourselves.

Moments of crisis have to be taken advantage of, not ignored or suffered through, whether that’s a personal tragedy, a moment of inspiration, or a gradual attrition of your will, causing dissatisfaction that culminates in desperation to change. Sometimes there are good reasons to have a midlife crisis, not to accept a slump but to use it as a pivot point.

As we see examples of late bloomers making these transitions across various fields of endeavor, three characteristics will recur:

• Persistent. Though they often don’t work towards a specific goal, neither do late bloomers lavish their life away on useless trifles, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase. They persist in following their interests and ambitions; they are unable to let it go, but, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, they have to be flexible about how and when this persistence accrues into a tangible achievement or accomplishment.
• Earnest. Late bloomers are serious, perhaps intense, obsessive, occasionally eccentric, volatile, or weird. Not infrequently, the people around them don’t quite understand who they are capable of being. Their earnestness can make them seem strange, off-putting, and makes it difficult to see how and where their talent could flourish: their capability often hides in plain sight.
• Quiet. Their ambitions are usually secret, or unknown to themselves for a long time. They pursue their interests quietly. Their ability and confidence grow with experience. It might be quite late in the day when they realize that their capabilities actually make them fit for some exceptional enterprise.

So, despite the fact that late bloomers are often overlooked, they are often quietly, persistently developing the qualities, on the long and winding road that will eventually lead them to success, when the right opportunity comes along. Importantly, the more active they are in this process, the more likely they are to find that opportunity and turn it to their advantage.

This article 3 subtle traits of successful late bloomers is featured on Big Think.

Stone Age Economics, written by the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, is a rich anthology of firsthand accounts of hunter-​gatherer community life from different corners of the world. The accounts paint a rhythmic pattern of work and rest such that people would work hard for part of the day and then spend a longer time in relative leisure. If a day was spent hunting, it would be followed by a couple of days of repose. Once everyone completed their work, they were not compelled to fill their ample free time doing any more.

Despite the persistent uncertainty and challenges of hunter-​gatherer life, there was surprisingly little inclination to spend many hours embroiled in backbreaking work, and intense work dominated no more than short bursts of time. As Czech anthropologist Leopold Pospisil, who did extensive research on the Kapauku people of Papua, describes in Sahlins’s anthology, “Only every other day is supposed to be a working day. Such a day is followed by a day of rest in order to ‘regain the lost power and health.’ ” When their work called for hard labor for longer periods, “they [would] relax for a period of several days, thus compensating for their ‘missed’ days of rest.”

In another account, ethnologist Martin Gusinde describes the hunter-​gatherer Yámana people of Tierra del Fuego, South America, in the 1920s: “The Yámana are not capable of continuous, daily hard labor, much to the chagrin of European farmers and employers for whom they often work. Their work is more a matter of fits and starts, and … they can develop considerable energy for a certain time. After that, they show a desire for an incalculably long rest period during which they lie about doing nothing.”

Almost every account in Sahlins’s anthology tells of a rhythmic pattern of working, in which an intense burst of work is followed by periods of lighter work and rest. Such a pattern could be imagined as a kind of power law: a mathematical relationship between two things in which a decrease in one gives rise to an increase in the other according to some power. In this case, as the laboriousness of the work rises, the time spent doing it falls, so the bulk of the time is spent doing moderate to light work. If we plot it as a graph, the power law relationship would look something like this:

This way of working seems to be typical of diverse hunter-​gatherer communities, irrespective of geography and independent of external pressures of weather, terrain, or climate. As Sahlins’s work demonstrates, and as anthropologist James Suzman also points out in Affluence Without Abundance, hunter-​gatherer communities — even those that still survive today — seem to have an innate propensity to work in this way.

In 2013, an American research group fitted forty-​four traditional hunter-​gatherers from the Hadza community in northern Tanzania with Global Positioning System (GPS) units as they went about foraging for food in their usual way. Almost half of their foraging bouts followed what is known as a Lévy walk: a power law pattern that roughly translates to walking short distances most often and long distances far less frequently. Perhaps even more intriguing, this pattern of walking was seemingly independent of the features of their environment. In other words, the Hadza hunter-​gatherers did not walk in a power law pattern because they needed to; they did so because they chose to. The Hadza are not unique. Other hunter-​gatherer societies such as the Me’Phaa of Mexico and the Cariri of Brazil also demonstrate Lévy walk patterns.

The instinct to hunt and forage in a power law pattern may have conferred an evolutionary advantage on our ancestors by making them less susceptible to life-­threatening exhaustion and hunger when stranded in remote and alien landscapes. If you have to locate a source of food in the wild with no prior knowledge of the terrain, the most efficient way to do so is by following a power law pattern: if you look for local sources first and venture out on long and exhausting expeditions only when absolutely necessary, you preserve energy for longer. The agricultural revolution and then the industrial revolution ironed over the instinct to behave and work in this way. The uniformity and order necessary for successful agriculture erased all spontaneity and fluctuations. Assembly lines simply continued and amplified this trend.

The blueprint of the instinct to work and behave in bursts, in a power law pattern, however, intractably endures and is even woven into the tapestry of our inner experience. Searching for a memory is a form of foraging for the mind, and the same pattern of foraging seen in the Hadza, the Me’Phaa, and the Cariri emerges in the brain when we scour its shelves for a memory that has long been filed away.

One compelling fragment of evidence for power laws embedded in the brain’s dynamics is seen in newborn mammals. Being awake is labor-​intensive for newborn brains, which are encoding new information and galvanizing neural connections at dizzying speeds. Sleep provides respite. Research has found that newborn rats flip randomly between sleep and awake states until they are around two weeks old, when the periods they spend awake start to follow a power law. They are awake for short bouts most of the time, and for long bouts less often — a pattern that will be familiar to parents of infants, who often nap in one‐to‐two-​hour intervals throughout the day.

Even adult humans living in a digitalized and predictable urban world seem to want to move and rest in a power law pattern when left to their own devices. Actigraphy studies have shown how we spontaneously pause to rest in between bursts of physical activity in a power law pattern, taking short breaks frequently and long breaks less often.

If power laws persist across climates and people and lands, if they choreograph how we explore the world around us and the depths of our own minds, if they carve our innate patterns of work and rest, could they also hold the secret to working better with our brains?

In 2006, researchers from Hungary, Portugal, and the United States raked through the archives of the Darwin Correspondence Project, the Freud Museum of London, and the Einstein Papers Project to see if there was a pattern in the way Darwin, Freud, and Einstein — three of the most celebrated minds of the twentieth century — answered their letters. In those days, letters were a form of knowledge work. Many scientists did not work in “laboratories” dedicated to spawning groundbreaking theories; rather, they did such thinking at home, on a writing desk. Profound scientific debates and even a form of peer review took place using the medium of letter writing. Darwin’s frequent letters to friends and colleagues chauffeured his mental voyage toward the theory of evolution.

Had Darwin, Freud, and Einstein replied to each letter as it arrived, there would be no obvious pattern to their letter writing. But this was not the case; the researchers found that there was a pattern. The time interval between receiving a letter and replying to it was often short and only occasionally long. Instead of writing like workers on an assembly line, with letters moving at constant speed on a conveyor belt, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein worked in rhythmic bursts with power law undertones.

Power laws are abundant in almost every facet of our natural environment, from the weather to ocean waves, from craters on the moon to volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and avalanches. We also inadvertently incorporate power laws into human creations: cities and towns show power laws, as do corporations, features of the internet, and language. The power law patterns of the world very likely imprinted themselves upon us during our evolution and inspired power law patterns in our own neural and behavioral dynamics.

This article Why hardwired “power laws” hold the secret to better work is featured on Big Think.

If you ever want to have your day ruined, talk to an economist. One of the things economists are fond of pointing out is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. What they mean by this is that there is a cost to everything. If you say you’re excited to go get a free lunch, and there is an economist around, they will be quick to point out that if you think it’s free, you’re wrong. You’re giving something up to enjoy that lunch: the time to get there, whatever else you could have been doing during the lunch, another meal you might have enjoyed, other people you could have spent that time with. There is, they will say, always a trade-off.

Once they have you depressed, they will emphasize that those trade-offs are often referred to in economic theory as opportunity costs — the value of what you give up when you choose between two mutually exclusive options. This is not a hard concept to understand. Any time we choose to do one thing, we are giving up something else. If I choose to accept my friend’s free tickets to an NBA game, I am giving up spending that time with someone else or watching a different sporting event. If I choose to linger after work for happy hour, I am giving up time with my family. If I choose to go home to my family immediately after work, I am sacrificing networking time with potentially powerful connections in my career.

The economists are right: There is no such thing as a free lunch, and everything has a cost, which means for every position on a given topic there are arguments against it. Those arguments may be weak; they may not raise costs so high that you feel you should change your mind, but they do exist. And you should always be aware of them.

For a simple example, consider something like seatbelt laws. Except for New Hampshire, all of the states in the United States require adults to wear seatbelts. (All states require children to wear seatbelts.) The rationale is what we see on road signs anytime we take a trip: They save lives and reduce medical care expenditures related to accidents. Enough of us are convinced this is true; otherwise, all these seatbelt laws would not have passed. They have become so commonplace that few of us even question them anymore. That was not always so. 

There are costs. One is that people must give up some of their personal autonomy when mandated to wear a seatbelt. Some may use the argument that if people want to choose to risk death when they drive, that is their choice; we don’t need a paternalistic government to protect us from every harm to which we might want to subject ourselves. Another cost that not everyone considers is that seatbelt laws disproportionately burden those families who want to have more children. It’s no longer the 1970s, when a hoard of kids climbing around in the back of a station wagon was perfectly legal. Requiring that every seat in a car have a belt means that any parents who would like to have more than three kids must incur a greater cost to purchase a bigger vehicle and will be disincentivized from having larger families.

When the various states were debating passing seatbelt laws, those and other arguments were brought to the fore. They obviously did not win the day almost anywhere, but they were real arguments that policy-makers needed to take seriously.

Similar arguments exist for any policy position you might adopt. So always ask yourself: What is the cost to what you want to see happen in the world? Once you come to understand that, you will have a better grip on the best argument against your view. You may even come to realize that the cost of what you want is just too high, which may force you to tweak or nuance your position. Doing so will make your viewpoint even stronger.

That is an important point. You are not seeking out the costs of your preferred position only to weaken your arguments. You are seeking them out to find the weaknesses in your position. The result will be that you either improve your view, or you realize you were mistaken. Either way, your world will be enhanced.

Don’t be afraid of arguments that make you uncomfortable

We live in a society that attempts at almost every turn to protect us from potential harm and discomfort. Psychologists, theologians, teachers, and philosophers have all recognized that some time, over the last sixty years, the wealthy nations of the Western world have shifted culturally. We used to adopt the mindset that people should lose themselves as part of various higher causes. In some instances, this belief was one of necessity. Children born into an environment in which the only option was to produce food or die needed to learn as quickly as possible to contribute to the enterprise of survival. The goal was to help them become contributors at an early age.

But the wealth and luxury of the modern world changed that. Many segments of society now operate with the mindset that we must not only protect children from physical harm, but from any notion of discomfort — mental, emotional, or physical. Instead of asking how we can contribute to society, we have started asking how society can be therapeutic to us. Anna Lembke traces all of this back to Freud:

[Freud’s] groundbreaking psychoanalytic contribution was that early childhood experiences, even those long forgotten or outside of conscious awareness, can cause lasting psychological damage. Unfortunately, Freud’s insights that early childhood trauma can influence adult psychopathology has morphed into the conviction that any and every challenging experience primes us for the psychotherapy couch.

With that conviction, many of us have been trained from an early age to avoid discomfort, including the discomfort of ideas or arguments that challenge how we view the world.

If you want to engage in constructive dialogue, if you want to help solve the world’s real problems, then you need to overcome that instinct our modern culture has created in us. Peacemakers are not afraid of arguments or facts that challenge their worldview. They seek them out. They analyze them. If arguments or facts make them uncomfortable, they seek to understand why.

Know that each of us is part of a culture that has increasingly trained us to avoid any and all distress. Once you embrace that, you can then prepare yourself to find and embrace ideas and arguments that may prove you wrong.

This article The “peacemaker’s paradox”: Why you should embrace the arguments made against you is featured on Big Think.

I like to make chit-chat now and then. One of my go-to conversation topics — most people’s go-to conversation topic — is TV. I might open with, “are you watching anything good at the moment?” This often opens a half-decent, mostly entertaining discussion. But sometimes, my opening salvo falls flat. The other person says something like, “Oh, I’ve not got the time to watch TV.”

It’s an answer that bothers me. For one, it’s laced with not a small whiff of condescension: If you’re watching TV, you must be lazy. But mostly, it bothers me because it’s not strictly true. What people mean is, “I’ve prioritized other things in my day.” And that’s fine. We each have our own personal values, concerns, and preferences.

“I’ve not got time to watch TV” means “TV doesn’t interest me as much as this or that.”

The fact is that we all have the same number of hours in the day, and it’s up to us to decide how we spend them. Some people will most certainly have more “free hours” than others, but for most of us, we have at least a few hours to spend as we want. And according to “the 5-hour rule,” how we choose to spend those hours might mean the difference between success and mediocrity.

The anatomy of a day

There are 24 hours in a day (or 1,440 minutes, if you really like to count your life away). The average person sleeps around eight hours (with the Dutch sleeping the most and the Singaporeans the least). That leaves 16 waking hours left to spend (I’m afraid those “learn while you’re sleeping” tapes aren’t likely to work). We need to subtract the seven to eight hours a day during which most people work, though those sleepy Dutch work a bit less. So, we’re down to nine remaining hours.

Much of those nine hours are taken up by life administration: shopping, housework, unpaid labor (e.g. care work), and eating and drinking. Of course, there are massive cultural differences lurking in that category. For instance, Our World in Data reveals that people “in France, Greece, Italy and Spain report spending more time eating than people in most other European countries. The country where people spend the least time eating and drinking is the USA (63 minutes).”

Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge disparity in how care work or unpaid labor is divided across genders. According to the OECD, “Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men.” This has a knock-on effect in how many leisure hours the genders have to spend. For instance, in Norway and New Zealand the difference is almost negligible. In Portgual and India, however, men have 50 percent more leisure time than women.

The 5-hour rule

Most people have at least a few hours to do with what they want. For more than half of the population, those hours are wasted away on non-work-related phone worship. But these are not the people who will become the entrepreneurs, innovators, and success stories of tomorrow.

Over the last few decades, a cottage industry has sprung up that examines and dissects the habits and values of “self-made” millionaires. One of the key findings that comes up again and again is known as the “5-hour rule.” In short, this is the rule where we spend one hour a day learning, reflecting, and thinking. We do this five times a week (which makes up the “5-hour” rule). The rule dates to Benjamin Franklin, who would devote (at least) an hour each day specifically to learning something new. Franklin would rise early to read and write. He even set up his own club of artisans and experimenters. Today, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates all employ some version of the 5-hour rule.

The idea is that devoting an hour of your day to education exercises the mind, improves your skills, and rehearses great discipline. In education-speak, the 5-hour rule gives us both knowledge and skills.

How to spend your hour

Even accepting the wisdom in the 5-hour rule, it can still come over as daunting. After a long day, with tired eyes and a throbbing headache, most of us will reach for the TV remote, not Tolstoy. But here are three “first steps” to the 5-hour rule.

Learn…however you can. Reading print on a book is one way of learning, but it’s not the only way. In fact, if you don’t enjoy reading that much, it’s likely you’ll learn less from it anyway. Today, podcasts, audiobooks, and spoken radio are all great ways to spend your hour. What’s more, the internet is full of educational, entertaining, and enlightening long-form articles, which are much more digestible than huge, hand-aching tomes.

Experiment. Bettering yourself does not always mean cramming your head with facts. The most successful people in life were not those who stumbled on some magic treasure in the woods, but who tried and failed, tried, and failed again. In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford says success means we “first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.” Try something new. Try something differently. When we experiment, we both have fun and learn a great deal

Reflect. Failure is only valuable insofar as it improves the future. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Each failure is different, and each defeat is closer to victory than the last. There are many ways to reflect. For some, it might mean a diary, journal, or ten minutes spent simply ruminating. For others, it could mean talking things over and unpacking what happened. When we reflect on our days and our mistakes, we turn failures into learning experiences.

So, why not give the 5-hour rule a go? At worst, it will make you a bit more interesting at the next family gathering. At best, it might make you a few million dollars.

This article The 5-hour rule: How to turn a wasted day into a successful one is featured on Big Think.

We can sometimes approach household finances as a cold math problem. You start with a fixed income. You pay your bills and utilities, maybe save a small percentage, and finally spread out the remainder to see you through to next month. Plug in the numbers, do the operations, and you’re done. Budget budgeted!

But this approach has a major flaw: It puts math before mindfulness. That’s a problem because finances are math problems complicated by the variables of human psychology.

Every day, we face a seemingly infinite number of ways to spend our finite incomes on our many — always competing and often contradictory — needs and wants. Do you splurge this weekend on a meal out or cook at home? Is your closet looking too dated or ratty for the office? Do you service the car today or set aside that money for your next doctor’s visit (just in case)? And those don’t even consider the challenge of saving for retirement, a house, and the kids’ college fund. There’s just not enough to go around, and the perceived importance of those needs and wants can shift at any given moment.

Overwhelmed by this cognitive load, many people find themselves gravitating to the extremes. Either they save themselves the stress and make purchases mindlessly, or they micromanage their finances to the point that they are living for the ledger. Far better is to find the balance between the extremes, and one method for doing that is the Japanese budgeting technique of Kakeibo.

Kakeibo helps people to see past the extraneous to reveal the essence of what their finances are and how to use them. It does this by showing users not only what they are doing with their money, but how they can use that money to spend well, save well, and, ultimately, live well.

Before the math, mindfulness

Kakeibo (pronounced “kah-keh-boh”) was developed in 1904 by Hani Motoko, Japan’s first female journalist and later a publisher of a woman’s monthly magazine. Motoko wanted to help the women of her day, who often lived on a limited budget, meet their life and savings goals. To that end, she created a budgeting system that combines utility, simplicity, and mindfulness. 

Even Motoko’s chosen name betrays this intent: Kakeibo means simply “household account” in its native Japanese.

Kakeibo starts with a mindfulness exercise. Before you even crack the spine on your first ledger, the technique asks you to consider four self-reflective questions. They are:

1. How much income do you make a month?
2. How much would you like to save?
3. How much are you currently spending?
4. Where would you like to improve?

These questions not only create financial goals but also point to what financial advisor Paula Pant calls “first-principles thinking.” In terms of budgeting, first-principles thinking means considering the values you want in your life and how you might cultivate them. It’s the realization that money is a means to facilitate a satisfying life — not a series of tactics and strategies aimed at controlling it.

According to Pant, this requires us to accept a basic truth. That being: You can afford most things if you plan and save, but you can’t afford everything. As she told us in an interview:

“You can’t have an endless series of ands. You might not be able to have that thing and something else and something else and something else. And that doesn’t just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention – any limited resource. And life is the ultimate limited resource. So when you practice being better at managing your money, you practice being better at managing your life.”

Finance advisor and Kakeibo proponent Harumi Maruyama expresses a similar perspective, albeit a little more forcefully. As she told the BBC: “Money is not limitless. It has limits. It’s totally up to you whether you save it or lose it.”

The four categories of Kakeibo

After accepting that truth and getting clearer on your first principles, it’s finally time for math.

At the beginning of the month, calculate your projected income and subtract your fixed costs (things like rent, utilities, and other bills). Anything that remains is how much money you have to spend or save that month. Then every time you spend money, write it down in your ledger and label it as one of four categories:

• Essentials (gas, toiletries, and groceries).
• Non-essentials (movies, restaurants, and spa days).
• Culture (books, museum visits, education, and charity).
• Unexpected (doctor visits, car repairs, and a gift for that friend’s birthday you totally forgot).

Why do this? A potential trap of some budgeting systems is to create many fine-grained categories believing they will increase accuracy. There’s a category for groceries, one for restaurants, one for repairs, one for gas, one for clothes, one for books, and so on. However, the end result of this approach is unnecessary confusion that obscures your spending mindset.

By bucketing your spending into these four categories, you simplify your budget so you can see the big picture. If your new shoes are for fun, they go in the non-essentials category. If they are a job requirement, they go under essentials. This way, you can be as mindful of how you’re spending your money as what you’re spending your money on.

Most Kakeibo proponents also recommend using a handwritten ledger to track your expenses throughout the month. They point to research suggesting that when we write something by hand we retain the information better and create a stronger connection with the content. Others use a spreadsheet app for its ability to search for specific entries, group categories, and make graphs of their spending quickly and easily. 

Whether you go with a handwritten ledger or a digital one — I won’t tell if you don’t — just ensure it’s a method you will use. You want your ledger to contain all of your monthly expenses, and you want to be in the habit of entering your spending regularly (for example, nightly or at the end of the week).

At the end of the month, you’ll review your spending. Calculate how much you spent in each category as well as how much you saved. Then compare the results to the goals you set for yourself. 

• Did you save as much as you thought?
• Did certain essentials slip your mind in your original assessment? 
• Did some of your non-essential purchases seem unnecessary in hindsight? 
• Did any unexpected purchases come with unexpectedly high price tags, too?

If you reached your savings goals, great! If you didn’t, that’s also fine. There’s no reason to feel shame. You can’t win or lose your at finances, nor are they a social competition like a video game-style leaderboard. Rather, you should view your ledger as data and your mistakes as lessons to inform better decisions next month. Maybe you need to cut back on some non-essential purchases to save more. Conversely, maybe your savings goals were too aggressive, and you need a few more non-essentials to destress on the weekend.

Whatever your ledger reveals to you, you can return to the four questions and answer them in light of your new knowledge. As a bonus, research shows that tracking your expenses promotes confidence and relaxation, which in turn motivates us to achieve our goals.

Find your financial balance

Underlining Kakeibo is a Japanese philosophy of life called nagomi. While it doesn’t have a direct translation, it’s centered on the concepts of balance, harmony, and sustainability and how to bring those qualities into life’s endeavors.

In his book on the philosophy, Ken Mogi writes that “[nagomi] is not about finding shortcuts to happiness, success, or wealth; it is about understanding and enhancing the good and positive aspects of our lives to balance the difficulties that inevitably befall everyone one of us.”

Kakeibo asks you to do the same with your finances. This is why it includes a special category for culture. The method recognizes that your life shouldn’t be chained to your finances. Rather, your finances represent a resource — one of many — that cultivates growth, learning, and meaningful life activities.

And while I’ve written about Kakeibo as an individual technique; in fact, it has had many different iterations since Motoko first devised it a century ago. It’s also highly adaptable. Maybe you find that you need to add a fifth category, or that you need to create your own savings categories, or that you spend so much on books it’s best to consider them separate from other expenses. That’s fine as long as those changes support your first principles.

However, by taking the time to shed the extraneous and focus on the essence of your finances, you avoid the over-optimization trap while also making your budget feel manageable and motivating. This will help you spend in a way that allows for a mindful, meaningful life in the here and now while saving in a way that ensures the same for your future.

Learn more on Big Think+

With a diverse library of lessons from the world’s biggest thinkers, Big Think+ helps businesses get smarter, faster. To access Paula Pant’s full class for your organization, request a demo.

This article Kakeibo: The Japanese way to manage money through mindfulness is featured on Big Think.

Although most of us are familiar with the concept of DNA — the nucleic acids that determine so much of who we are — few of us have tried to manipulate these tiny naturally occurring chemicals to enhance their application in lifesaving therapeutics or game-changing nanotechnologies. That is what Dr. Jennifer Heemstra, working with the other members of her thriving research laboratory at Emory University, does for a living. 

On the frontier in any scientific field, a thoughtful hypothesis not supported by data is the right kind of wrong. Scientists don’t last long in their fields if they can’t stand to fail. They intuit the value intelligent failure brings. It would be a lie to claim these failures aren’t disappointing. They are. Like Olympic bronze medalists, however, scientists and inventors learn healthy ways to think about failure. 

And Dr. Heemstra is a scientist who not only practices this healthy thinking, she also preaches it — to the students in her lab and in tweets, articles, and videos. 

I met with Jen on Zoom on a summer day in 2021. Scientists are among the most resilient and thoughtful practitioners of intelligent failure, and I wanted to learn more from Jen about how an intelligent failure might play out. 

Behind her, on the shelves behind her desk, are various models and action figures she’s collected. She points to one and says it’s named Steve, after a PhD student, Steve Knutson, who used a chemical reagent called glyoxal (an organic compound often used to link other chemicals in scientific experiments) to react with nucleotides in single-stranded RNA. When I ask why this might be important (revealing my relative ignorance about chemistry), Jen says, “Aha!” and explains that the lab had been ecstatic because of how many avenues of research and development glyoxal opened up. In addition to applications for controlled or time-release therapeutic drugs, they’d invented a kind of scientific tool for other chemists working in synthetic biology or research to control different gene circuits. 

What about failure? Apparently, even someone as comfortable with failure as Jennifer Heemstra naturally begins a failure story with the ending — the successful outcome. Which only reinforces how difficult it is to talk about failure. 

Jen takes a step back. Speaking rapidly, she explains that in trying to develop a method for isolating certain RNAs, they realized that it wouldn’t happen when the RNA was folded, or double stranded. So the first problem was to unravel the RNA, a necessary step in getting a protein to bind. Steve began to experiment. Would adding a new reagent (an ingredient used to cause a chemical reaction) already in the lab work? 

It didn’t work. 

Salt helps RNA fold. What if he experimented with depriving the RNA of salt? This didn’t work either. Steve was disappointed. But not devastated, as he might have been had Jen not worked so hard to create an environment in the lab where the focus is on learning and discovery. As she explains, “High-performing individuals aren’t used to making mistakes. It’s important to learn to laugh at ourselves or we’ll err on the side of being too afraid to try.” 

Her passion for the central role embracing failure plays in science research has led Heemstra to write about how students, and especially women, can easily be discouraged from pursuing careers in science, stating in a tweet, “The only people who never make mistakes and never experience failure are those who never try.” But really, Steve’s failures were not mistakes. 

Mistakes are deviations from known practices. Mistakes happen when knowledge about how to achieve a certain result already exists but isn’t used. Such as the time when Jen was a graduate student and collected weird data simply because she was using the pipette incorrectly. Proper pipette usage promptly produced data that made sense. She laughs at this story, too, explaining that she tries to create a lab culture where people can “laugh at and normalize silly mistakes.” 

That the protein failed to bind on double-stranded DNA when it had succeeded in binding on single-stranded RNA was not, however, a “silly mistake.” It was the undesired result of a hypothesis-driven experiment. A failure, yes, but an intelligent failure — and an inevitable part of the fascinating work of science. Most important, that failure would inform the next experiment. 

Clearly, there was more to learn about how to unfold RNA. Steve went back to the literature and found a paper written by Japanese biochemists in the 1960s, published in a German scientific journal, detailing the use of glyoxal in other, not unrelated, applications. He started to wonder about using glyoxal and set up an experiment with it. 

Eureka! With some tweaking, the glyoxal allowed him to cage and re-cage the nucleic acids and restore total function. While not an announcement to flash electronically in 20-foot letters on a Times Square billboard, for Jen and Steve as research scientists it was cause for celebration, and better yet, it led to new research questions. Their story shows how success in new territory depends on a willingness to endure the right kind of wrong — the intelligent kind.

This article We must learn from science that “intelligent failure” is the key to success is featured on Big Think.

There is nothing so mind-expanding as staying with a different family for a while. It’s only when you spend a decent amount of time around different people, who are doing things differently, that you realize that your way isn’t the only way.

For example, I grew up in a household where eating was largely utilitarian. Our family would gather, we would d have our dinner, and then we would d go back to whatever it was we were doing. We ate to live. It’s not that meal times were held in funereal silence, but my family just saw the dinner table as a place for dinner. But then, I stayed at Clare’s house.

Clare’s family treated meal times very differently. For them, the food was just an excuse to have a very long, relaxed chat. The dinner was, if anything, an irrelevant and movable component. When we finished our food there was no, “Right, who’s washing up?” or “Let’s go watch TV!” Instead, everyone sat back and reclined. Clare’s family was all about the after-dinner. They were there for a good natter and the contented sighs of the full-bellied.

Only now do I realize this has a word: sobremesa.

Table talk

Sobremesa is a Spanish word that represents a Spanish tradition. On the one hand, it’s simply the physical act of staying at the table after your dinner and talking. But, more than that, it’s about committing to those friends and family who are there, making space for those people in your busy day. Sobremesa is a mindset that pushes aside all the other things you “have” to or “need” to do and instead relaxing with those around you.

Those who grew up in a sobremesa tradition will likely find it comical to have it analyzed so much, but sobremesa represents a value system others do not share. Sobremesa signifies the importance of bonding, laughter, and personal connections. It sees “down time” as an essential time, and the dinner table is a great place for this down time to occur.

Sobremesa is a hugely important part of forming a deep and lasting connection with someone. And the bonding that results from it doesn’t strictly have to happen at the dinner table. At school, you see the same faces every day, and life-long friends are forged in the mutual ordeal of chemistry, math, and gym class. At work, you grumble in companionable solidarity with a colleague who is just as tired and jaded as you. Over time, this results in a deep bonding that is characteristic of sobremesa.

Create your own sobremesa

So, if we know that quality down time is important for relationships, how can we make time for it in our ultra-busy world? Here are three practical suggestions.

The road trip. Don’t believe the movies; most road trips are boring. In between the singing and gawping at attractions, there is a lot of nothing. For hours and hours, you will see only tarmac, punctuated by the occasionally interesting car. And that’s a good thing because the reason road trips are fun is that you get to — you have to — talk to the person next to you. A friend of mine will only drive with her family to some distant holiday spot because she says it’s the best bonding opportunity they all get.

Roll your sleeves up. Do a job with someone that cannot be done in an hour — something like painting the rooms in your house or building a deck outside. It could be as mundane as raking leaves or as exciting as digging a fire pit, but when you do something for long enough with someone, you will find that you end up talking a great deal. It might be small talk aimed mostly at distraction, but that’s exactly what we want.

Take a course or a class. When you sign up to learn how to paint or how to speak Japanese, it’s not just you and the teacher; it’s you and a lot of others who are all there in mutual incompetence. If you sign up to take a class with a friend or acquaintance, then you will find that this class deepens your friendship. When you are both fumbling your way around a camera’s settings or staggering through the steps of a salsa, you will find a connection that will last much longer.

This article Sobremesa: To live a better life, we should eat dinner like the Spanish is featured on Big Think.

You are a half-hour into your day when your phone chimes with a text from your boss: “Please call me asap.”

What’s the first thought that comes to mind? It’s probably not, I’ve been nominated for an award or She loved the report I sent. Suddenly, your mood has plummeted, your palms are sweaty, and you want to do just about anything other than make that call.

Then, two minutes later, you get another text: “I’ve got an idea for today’s meeting that I want to run by you.”

We’ve all starred in this movie at some point—because we’re human. In the last thirty days, you probably created a mental story in response to something that happened. Maybe it was a confusing email from your biggest client or a non-response from the person you’ve been dating for six months. You spent time and emotional energy worrying about it, creating stress and anxiety in your day. And then it turned out to be fine, or better than fine. You were relieved, but you also felt emotionally or mentally exhausted.

Even though most of what happens to most of us in any given day is neutral or positive, our assumptions or predictions tend to be negative. We add significance and drama to situations and circumstances, often when there’s no proof of either.

If you’re telling yourself positive stories, like “I did so well in that presentation” or “I’ve never looked better,” great! Keep going. What we want to help you tackle are the negative, disempowering stories that create unnecessary suffering, stress, and anxiety.

Some stories can be short-lived, like the examples above, but the more costly stories are those that we have been telling ourselves and reinforcing for months, years, even decades—like “My boss doesn’t appreciate me”, “That team doesn’t care”, or “Nothing I do is good enough for my parents.” These stories convince us that some things simply cannot be changed, cannot be any better than they are right now. They have a big impact on our happiness, confidence, resilience, relationships, and well-being.

For all these reasons, our disempowering stories keep us from creating the life we want and keep us from achieving our visions. They’re often interwoven with our limiting beliefs. They influence how we behave in the present, so they influence what’s possible in the future. They self-perpetuate. 

You have zero control over other people and many circumstances, but you have 100 percent choice in your perspective.

We’ve known this for thousands of years. The Stoic philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, writing about how to respond to the things that happen to us, said, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been . . . It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.”

When you choose a more empowering perspective, the ripple effects of positive change can be profound. It helps to start by understanding the source of your stories and their impact in your life. As you may have noticed in the last two sentences, we use the words “story” and “perspective” interchangeably.

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It collects bits of information and uses them to interpret the world—to create a story. The brain does this so that it can quickly interpret what’s happening now and predict what will happen next—to keep us alive. Our stories become the lens through which we see the world. They influence how we perceive people and situations and what we expect about our future. Here’s the problem: They are based on our perception and the brain’s interpretation. They are not reality or fact.

Facts are indisputable data points, without much emotion or drama. Your perspective is a story your brain makes up about those facts. “I’m in a meeting speaking to eight people” is a fact. “I’m doing a great job of sharing my ideas with my team” is a story or perspective (a good one!). “I am forty-eight” is a fact. “I’m getting old” is a perspective. “He’s been my manager for three years” is a fact. “He’s never going to put me up for promotion” is a perspective.

We relate to our perspective like it’s the only perspective, like it’s the truth—but it usually is not.

If something is the truth, there can’t be any other possibilities, which means the story can’t change, and the future can’t look different than the past. We’ll be stuck in that story until we choose to change it. While we may not be able to control the facts, we can control the story we tell ourselves and other people. When we do, it’s like we’ve chosen to put on a different pair of glasses. We see the world differently.

This article Unlock success by taking control of “disempowering narratives” is featured on Big Think.

We’ve been conditioned, from an early age, to believe that one day we’ll reach a moment of “arrival.” Get good grades, go to a good school, get a good job, make good money, and we’ll be fulfilled. Even as we get older, and realize that life isn’t quite so simple, we still manage to convince ourselves that if we can just get that next sale, next client, next promotion, next deal—then we’ll finally be happy. 

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University calls this the “arrival fallacy.” Every time you hit a target that’s supposed to bring you lasting joy, the goalpost moves again. And when the chase is never-ending, when we are constantly in pursuit of a feeling we can’t quite obtain, our tank inevitably runs out of gas. We become exhausted, we burn out. And we quietly start to question the point of it all. 

Because if outer success (wealth, status, achievement) isn’t leading us to a feeling of inner success (joy, well-being, fulfillment), then what’s the point? What’s the purpose of hard work and ambition if getting what we want only leads us back to the emotional place we were in before? 

A few years ago, I began to realize that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Nearly everywhere I looked, people seemed lost and angry. Lost because if there is no point of arrival, then where the hell are we on the map? Angry because we paid the money, went to college, took out loans, got jobs, showed up every day, and did all the things we were supposed to do—only to find that we were no closer to the sense of joy that we had been chasing all these years. 

So a lot of us checked out. We disengaged. We quit quietly or left our jobs. When this happened en masse, they called it the “Great Resignation.” Experts went on television to argue that it was a flash in the pan, a ripple effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. What they didn’t understand is that this sense of dissatisfaction had been building long before this virus disrupted our lives. 

In 2015, a joint working paper from Stanford and Harvard reported that health problems arising from workplace anxiety accounted for more deaths each year than diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease. And in 2019, the World Health Organization included “burnout” in its International Classification of Diseases, naming it an “occupational phenomenon.” 

For too long, we have fixated on the future of work and ignored the future of worth. For too long, we’ve dismissed “joy” as being too flimsy to fit into a place of business. And for too long, we’ve assumed that outer success will lead to inner success, despite history proving again and again that this has never been the case. 

The Bhagavad Gita — the Hindu book of living — says that each of us has a dharma, or a “sacred duty.” Duty to whom, exactly? To the fire burning inside of you. Some call this purpose, others call it your gift. My grandfather, my “Bauji”, called it your essence. 

Bauji believed that we all have an essence, something inside of us that was uniquely assigned by the universe. This goes deeper than talent or skill. It’s a calling. An inner necessity. 

Your essence doesn’t care about power, promotions, or possessions. It only cares about one thing: expression. 

If essence is who you really are, then expression is how you show up in the world. Your essence is always calling for you — expression is how you take that call. 

There’s a saying in the Gospel of Thomas: If you bring forth what is within you, that thing will save you. If you don’t, it will destroy you. That’s the thing about your essence. It is an inner flame that either lights up the world around you or burns a hole inside of you. 

Each of us gets to choose between expression or emptiness. But no one escapes that choice. 

It’s pretty simple, really. When you’re expressing your essence, you’re in your dharma. You come alive in a brand-new way. You feel confident, creative, and caring. You are no longer asking for permission to do what you love. You are serving others with energy and kindness. 

And you are experiencing true joy—not just from the goals you hit, but from the actions you take.

This article How “dharma” can beat team burnout and unloop the “arrival fallacy” is featured on Big Think.

Manifestation coaches are reinventing the law of attraction — the belief that you attract what you focus on — for a new generation. They spread the philosophy that self-worth is the law of attraction and that we can manifest anything that’s in alignment with “our current state of subconscious worthiness.” 

Dressed like fashion bloggers, these new leaders speak of “calling in” unseen powers to materialize new homes, jobs, or maybe just that perfect pair of jeans. On the To Be Magnetic website, one happy customer detailed manifesting a discounted white Le Creuset tea kettle. Other leaders skew more ambitious, selling $2,000 money workshops that reportedly draw in tenfold the class fee, thereby offering their own spin on the prosperity gospel.

Manifestation holds that there’s a tangible connection between the mind and cosmic workings. Spiritual influencers’ messages of overcoming personal struggles hold that you need a belief in yourself since “the universe has your back.” That and with talk of modern-day issues — body image pressures, noncommittal boyfriends, sexist bosses — they’re instantly relatable. 

Today, Jessie De Lowe, a manifestation coach and co-founder of the lifestyle site How You Glow, likens manifestation to life coaching. The majority of De Lowe’s clients are young, female, and college-educated. Though they possess countless advantages, she describes an unsatisfied group gripped by peer competitiveness and unrealistic expectations fueled by social media. They aren’t comparing themselves to the millennial next door. They’re comparing themselves to start-up founders and the globe-trotting friends clogging their Instagram feed. “They feel inadequate, like they’re never where they should be [already],” says De Lowe.

Add an unpredictable job market, rampant employee disengagement, and tales of male-dominated workplaces, and it’s no wonder young women find themselves searching for ways to hack the universe. It’s an appealing concept for those raised to believe that if they follow certain steps, they could get what they want. They were led to trust in a meritocracy, that good hard work always wins. And that, of course, they were special, as told to them 1,001 times by their parents and kindergarten teachers. 

Millennials had a hyperstructured upbringing that gave them a false sense of control, says the clinical psychologist Goali Saedi Bocci, author of The Millennial Mental Health Toolbox. Raised on happy Disney endings and American exceptionalism, they struggle with the anxiety of not getting what they were promised. “They grew up with the idea that if you want to get the best grades, you do the extra credit,” she told me. Apple-polishing millennials got straight As, went to college, then graduated into a recession and found themselves saddled with student debt. Those who secured good jobs later felt stifled by what they considered meaningless positions or weren’t adequately prepared for the mundanity of corporate life. 

Workplace stress is particularly painful for a percentage of millennials who define themselves through their employment. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” they were told (much to their grandparents’ confusion, who warned that work was to pay the bills). They were naively brought up to “follow your passion,” and they just did that. If Americans once clocked in and out at the office, today you’ll hear them speak of their life’s “calling” and their job as a “mission.” In that sense, their job becomes far more than a job — their heart and soul are poured into it. Work-life balance becomes impossible because the self and work are intertwined. 

For those who are not living their calling, it’s a different sort of pressure — one in which you’re forced to endure hearing about cool start-up jobs while you draft legal documents. And if you failed to succeed, the American creed of meritocracy insinuates that you simply didn’t try hard enough — you weren’t passionate enough — despite a flawed and at times unfair employment market (or the loss of nearly 9 million jobs during the 2007–2009 recession). You believe you have only yourself to blame. 

The San Francisco–based psychotherapist Tess Brigham sees mid-career patients trying to make sense as to why they can’t afford a down payment or why they’re still stuck in middle management. Manifestation dangles the promise of speeding up their career — tangible tactics to improve their chances — but also comfort in that it will all work out. “If you say the universe has a path for me, there’s something to hold on to,” Brigham told me. 

Or, as Joseph Baker, an associate professor of sociology at East Tennessee State University and the editor of the academic journal Sociology of Religion, explains, there is a natural human tendency to impute purpose to our experiences, to interpret a larger plan in place. If we can’t find that framework of agency, we’ll create it ourselves: “What we do find pretty consistently is that when organized religion recedes the paranormal often fills that gap,” says Baker. 

Manifesters essentially adopt a spiritual version of the “growth mindset,” the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck’s theory that one’s abilities can be cultivated through effort, dedication, and perseverance. Dweck’s research stresses that brains and talent are not the be-all and end-all, rather that optimistically putting in time and diligence leads to higher achievement. On the flip side, a “fixed mindset” is a belief that you lack the right traits, leading you to adopt a defeatist attitude that holds you can’t influence your future. 

From this perspective, manifestation makes sense. Followers simply take a resilient can-do outlook on life — that how you view yourself can determine success. Most psychologists will tell you that you’re better off keeping your chin up and taking actionable steps to build the life you want. As one manifester told me, it’s about expelling negativity “to get shit done.” 

Positivity is beneficial, but some manifestation leaders teach their flock to block out the negativity that hampers their pursuit of unrealistic dreams. Simplified versions of manifestation propel the idea that we can all reach our potential to draw in success or riches. But that shouldn’t disregard structural, social, and irrefutable challenges. As Steve Salerno argues in his book SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, all of us can’t prosper in the free market. “In any competitive closed system, there must be a loser for every winner. By definition then, self-help cannot work for everyone, and the more competitive the realm, the more this is so. Two wonderfully optimistic women who both desire the same man or the same job cannot both succeed… [it] could conceivably help some of us achieve our goals. But not all of us.”

The issue of how much we can truly control becomes even more readily apparent as manifesters attempt to conjure up larger gains: a rent-controlled apartment, a bigger bonus, or a romantic partner. In Facebook groups, some are downright frustrated and confused, lamenting unemployment or broken relationships. Some try to manifest better health or to heal diseases. 

There’s no harm in a growth mindset. It’s important to believe you can accomplish new tasks. But when that optimism is taken too far — when a growth mindset blinds you to obstacles (including very real medical ones) — problems arise. These new modes of spirituality can at times, if left unchecked, devolve into delusional thinking on steroids.

This article Manifestation coaches are preaching a phony “prosperity gospel” is featured on Big Think.

Early in my career, I was the youngest investment professional at the Sprout Group—then one of the oldest and largest venture capital firms in the world. I loved being exposed to different executive teams, industries, and companies at the leading edge of innovation, and I had the exciting opportunity to serve on boards of directors alongside much more experienced and knowledgeable investors and operators.

But when I think back on those days, what I remember most vividly is the incredible pressure I felt to perform. We regularly sat in meetings listening to startup teams pitch their ventures. The entrepreneurs would describe their solutions for problems in an industry’s supply chain, or pitch a new drug discovery process or an innovation in an enterprise software system. When the entrepreneurs stepped out of the room, we’d take turns voicing our impression of the opportunity. As a very junior professional just starting my career, I didn’t know enough to have a strong conviction about whether an investment was attractive, but I pretended to.

As my colleagues shared their impressions, I would try to decide what to advocate for. I might have liked a startup’s large market opportunity but worried about how undifferentiated the technology seemed—was this value proposition really that different from the other pitches we’d heard that year? Or I might have had mixed feelings about the competitive dynamics or the management team’s experience. When my turn came, I left my conflicting thoughts and uncertainties unspoken to make it appear that all of my thinking pointed in one direction and that I had high confidence in my recommendation. I would pick a side—to engage in due diligence or turn down the opportunity, or to invest or not—and advocate for it with certainty. 

I realized that by not sharing some of my thoughts, I was withholding information that could have increased our capacity to make good decisions. This caused me anxiety because I wanted to help our team, but I was handcuffed by my belief that I needed to appear knowledgeable, decisive, and confident of my opinions. 

After years of this, I got very good at looking like I knew what I was doing, and I consistently received great performance reviews and bonuses. But inside I felt disingenuous and inauthentic. I was constantly pretending. 

Eventually, the chronic stress of these feelings affected my body physically. Under constant pressure, I kept my muscles contracted, so much that, eventually, they lost their ability to relax. It turns out that muscles are malleable, for better or for worse! Mine became shorter and harder, preventing blood from penetrating them and delivering the nutrients needed for proper functioning and healing. 

It became painful for me to use my hands—to type, use the computer mouse, drive a car, open doors, even brush my teeth. After seeing many specialists, I was finally diagnosed with a repetitive strain injury called myofascial pain syndrome. 

As time went on, my condition grew worse. I met people with the same affliction who could no longer use their hands for more than ten minutes a day, and it terrified me. I was determined to do all I could to heal. But I suspected that what I needed to change was more than just my posture. 

Are you always racing to check tasks off a list? Do you spend most of your time trying to minimize mistakes? Do you suppress your uncertainties, impressions, or questions to try to appear like you always know what you’re doing?

Would you rather walk over hot coals than get feedback? These are all signs of chronic performance. While it may seem like minimizing mistakes is a reasonable use of our time or that appearing decisive is a wise career strategy, these habits can have a devastating impact on our skills, confidence, jobs, and personal lives. 

Chronic performance could be the reason you might be feeling stagnant in some area of your life. You might be working more hours or putting more effort into tasks, yet you never seem to get ahead. Life feels like a never-ending game of catch-up. That’s chronic performance—throwing more energy at tasks and problems yet staying at the same level of effectiveness. 

Most of us go about our days assuming that in order to succeed, we simply need to work hard to get things done. That’s what we’ve been told all our lives. So what’s the problem? Doesn’t hard work lead to better performance? The answer is a paradox—one I call the performance paradox. 

Maybe you’re a busy professional trying to learn a difficult new skill, like giving masterful presentations, motivating colleagues, or resolving conflict, yet no matter how much you work at it, you don’t seem to be getting better. 

You could be a leader whose team achieves the same results month after month even though you are certain everyone is working hard. Or perhaps you’d like to deepen your relationships with your family, friends, or colleagues, but conversations stay superficial. 

The performance paradox is the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we want to improve our performance, we have to do something other than just perform. No matter how hard we work, if we only do things as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, we get stuck at our current levels of understanding, skills, and capabilities. 

Too often, the performance paradox tricks us into chronic performance, which leads to stagnation. We get stuck in a hamster wheel in our work, as well as in our relationships, health, hobbies, and any aspect of life. It can feel like we’re doing our best, when in fact we’re missing out on discovering better ways to create, connect, lead, and live. 

Why does the paradox ensnare so many of us? It’s a seemingly logical response to feeling pressured, overwhelmed, and underwater. We think the answer is to just work harder and faster, but the way to improve our performance is not to spend more time performing. It is to do something else that is a lot more rewarding and, ultimately, productive.

This article Recognize the “performance paradox” and break free from stagnation at work is featured on Big Think.

Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your digital life — every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research — and exactly where to find it when you needed it. Such a system would need to be incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to maintain. After all, only the simplest, most frictionless habits endure long term.

It would need to be both flexible, adapting to your needs in different seasons of your life, and comprehensive, so you can use it in every one of the many places where you store information. For example, the Documents folder on your computer, a cloud storage platform, or a digital note-taking app.

But most of all, the ideal organizational system would be one that leads directly to tangible benefits in your career and life. It would dramatically accelerate you toward completing the projects and achieving the goals that are most important to you.

In other words, the ultimate system for organizing your life is one that is actionable.

Instead of putting more obstacles in your path, postponing the actions that will make a difference, it would pull those actions closer and make them easier to start and finish.

After more than a decade of personal experimentation, teaching thousands of students, and coaching world-class professionals, I’ve developed such a system. It’s being used today by elementary schoolchildren all the way to multinational corporations, and everyone in between.

It’s called PARA — a simple, comprehensive, yet flexible system for organizing any type of information across any digital platform.

Whether you want to save excerpts from a book you’re reading, a voice memo about an interesting new idea, inspiring quotes from a podcast interview, web bookmarks with useful online resources, notes from important meetings or phone calls at work, photos that remind you of cherished memories, or your own personal journal entries, this system will equip you with a set of tools for preserving any information far into the future. And not only preserving it, but skillfully using it to achieve anything you set your mind to.

PARA is based on a simple observation: there are only four categories that encompass all the information in your life: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.

You have projects you’re actively working on — short-term efforts (whether in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mind. For example: complete webpage design; buy a new computer; write research report; renovate the bathroom; finish Spanish-language course; set up new living room furniture.

You have areas of responsibility — important parts of your work and life that require ongoing attention more broadly. These might include: Work responsibilities, such as marketing, human resources, product management, research and development, direct reports, or software development. Personal responsibilities such as health, finances, kids, writing, car, or home.

Then you have resources on a range of topics you’re interested in and learning about, such as: graphic design; organic gardening; web design; Japanese cuisine; photography; marketing assets.

Finally, you have archives, which include anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active but you might want to save for future reference: projects you’ve completed or put on hold; areas that are no longer active or relevant; resources that you’re no longer interested in.

And that’s it! Four top-level folders — Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives — each containing subfolders dedicated to each specific project, area of responsibility, resource, and archive in your life.

It may be difficult to believe that a complex, modern human life like yours can be reduced to just four categories. It may feel like you have far more to deal with than can fit into such a simple system. But that is exactly the point: if your organizational system is as complex as your life, then the demands of maintaining it will end up robbing you of the time and energy you need to live that life.

Most of us first learned how to organize information in school. We were taught to categorize our class notes, handouts, and study material by academic subject, such as math, history, or chemistry. Without realizing it, we took that same approach into adulthood. We continued to categorize our documents and files according to incredibly broad subjects like “Marketing,” “Psychology,” “Business,” or “Ideas.”

This makes zero sense in your post-academic career. In the workplace, there are no classes, no tests, no grades, and no diplomas. There is no teacher to tell you what to write down for the final exam, because there isn’t one.

What you do have, both at work and in life, are outcomes you are trying to achieve. You are trying to launch a new product, come to a crucial decision, or reach a quarterly sales number. You are doing your best to plan a fun family vacation, publish a new piece of personal writing, or find affordable day care in your neighborhood.

In the midst of your busy day, as you are trying to make these things happen, you absolutely do not have time to go rummaging through a vast category like “Psychology” to find the article you saved six months ago.

Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now.

When you sit down to work on a graphic design project, for example, you will need all the notes, documents, assets, and other material related to that project all in one place and ready to go.

That might seem obvious, yet I’ve found it is exactly the opposite of what most people do. Most people tend to spread out all the relevant material they need to make progress in a dozen different places, which means they have to spend half an hour to locate them before they can even get started.

How do you make sure that all the material related to each project or goal is all in one place? You organize it that way in the first place. That way you know exactly where to put everything and exactly where to find it.

Your goals are that much closer to being achieved when all the information you need to execute your vision is right at hand. Let’s find out what you’re capable of achieving when the obstacles to that vision disappear.

This article The “PARA method” says we can organize our digital lives into 4 simple categories is featured on Big Think.