Life is an elevator pitch. You sell your skills when you want a job. You sell your products when you want business. Heck, even asking for a date is selling, except you’re selling yourself. The biggest problem in communicating yourself in any domain is simply time. You have an entire life history, interests and a […]
Why Goal-Setting Can Leave You Miserable
There are really only two reasons to set a goal: instrumental reasons and experiential reasons. When you set a goal for instrumental reasons, it is because the object of the goal will improve your happiness, lifestyle or contribute to some larger purpose. For example, if you’re incredibly overweight, changing your lifestyle may add several years […]
Does Thinking About the Ideal Life Actually Lead to Living One?
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates Do introspective, intelligent people enjoy life more than the masses? Often not. Ben Casnocha wrote this after the death of David Foster Wallace. Awarded the MacArthur genius grant, Wallace was brilliant, but unfortunately, as Casnocha writes: Wallace’s suicide raises for me the question about the correlation […]
Should You Wander the World or Build a Home?
I’m taking a break from my normal, opinionated rants to pose a question: should your twenties be devoted to wandering the world, living in many places, but never deeply? Or should they be spent picking a place to live and investing your time to build a home from that place? I’ll share my thoughts on […]
I'm a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, I've published weekly essays on this website to help people like you learn and think better. My work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.