1: “I feel like I’m letting the team down,” Miranda said.

Miranda, a superstar team member, was sitting across from her boss, entrepreneur Dan Martell, for their weekly one-on-one.

She “admitted she felt overwhelmed after a recent promotion to team leader,” Dan writes in his book Buy Back Your Time. “She went from specialist to managing more people than anyone else in our company,”

Miranda told him: “I’m … continue reading

1: “The world is watching,”  Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals.

The late Matthew Perry is playing a producer in the television drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He’s been hired to “rescue and relaunch a national weekly comedy show, based transparently on Saturday Night Live,” Oliver notes.

The stakes are high.

“Throughout the episode, anxiety builds visibly while a huge digital clock on the … continue reading

1: “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience,” said the educational reformer John Dewey.

Our ability to think, to reflect, to “think about our thinking” is integral to our ability to learn.

The term used to describe our ability to be aware of our thinking is called metacognition. 

Which author Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls “the forgotten secret to success” in her book Tiny Experiments… continue reading

1: What are our assumptions about time?

“The ancient Greeks had not one but two words to speak of time,”  Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

The Greek word Chronos refers to quantity.

“This is largely how most of us in the modern world relate to time,” Anne-Laure writes. “It is the time of clocks and calendars, of productivity tools … continue reading

1: Startup success is often associated with young entrepreneurs.

The data says otherwise: “The odds of a founder in their fifties reaching a successful exit are almost double those of a founder in their thirties,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

“Similar patterns apply to creative breakthroughs in science,” she notes.  “The peak productivity of a scientist occurs around the … continue reading

1: New Year’s resolutions don’t work.

“A survey of over 31 million activities by the team at Strava found that most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by January 12,”  Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in her book Tiny Experiments, “which they called Quitter’s Day.”

So, why do New Year’s resolutions fail?

Because we “overcommit to a bunch of lofty aspirations,” Anne-Laure explains.  “The human mind has a love/hate relationship with … continue reading

1: We like systems.

“Few things are more appealing, when we’re hoping to change our lives, than a new system for doing so,”  Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

Perhaps our goal is to experience the peace and clarity that we believe meditation can bring.

We resolve to become meditators.

We begin by purchasing a book … continue reading

1: Alexander Kallaway was just another high school student growing up in Russia.

“He had a quiet life, but the world called to him,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in her book Tiny Experiments.

“What new cultures and customs might he discover if he left this familiar environment?” he wondered. “What skills could he gain by learning from different perspectives?”

So, he figured out how to attend a Japanese university. … continue reading

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” -John Maynard Keynes

1: If self-renewal is our goal, the biggest challenge isn’t a lack of time or money.  It’s figuring out where to begin,  Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments.

We may ask: “Should I … continue reading

“As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things.” –John W. Gardner

1: Imagine we are going to visit our doctor.

We already … continue reading