1: Psychologist John Gottman can predict who will eventually get divorced a stunning 94 percent of the time.

In a pioneering 1992 study, John and his team interviewed fifty-two married couples.

They asked each couple “a variety of questions about how they met, why they decided to get married, and what changes their relationships had been through and observed them as they took part in a fifteen-minute discussion about a … continue reading

1: For several years, Sahil Bloom struggled to connect with his wife during difficult times, he writes in The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

Then, he heard about a book by a Baptist pastor, Gary Chapman, called The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate.

Gary suggests that there are five distinct love languages that describe … continue reading

1: Apple founder Steve Jobs once stated: “Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

“Remembering that we are going to die,” Steve said, “is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking we have something to lose. We are already naked.”

So, let’s imagine our funeral.

“Close … continue reading

1: “Think of a pleasant wine-tasting memory,” John Mark Comer writes in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World.

What is it that is underneath every thriving vine?

A trellis.  “A structure to hold up the vine so it can grown and bear fruit,” John Mark notes.

A trellis is to a vine as structure is to … continue reading

1: “I live right on the edge of downtown Portland in this fun micro-urban neighborhood,” John Mark Comer writes in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Early in the morning, as John Mark sits and prays while enjoying his first cup of coffee, his neighbors are filing out the door to do a sunrise run.

It’s “a house full of single people who are essentially a walking advertisement for Nike,” … continue reading

1: What if someone were to stop us in the street and ask us to share our top three priorities?

What would we say? Can we answer quickly and confidently?  

“This is the very first question I ask anyone I’m coaching,” says Google productivity expert Laura Mae Martin in her book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing.

“The first step for productivity is defining clearly what … continue reading

1: Professor Gay Hendricks was mad.

He sat in his car at a stoplight, replaying in his head the latest rant from the dean of his program at the University of Colorado, he writes in The Genius Zone.

His counseling department “locked horns repeatedly with the dean, who didn’t like some of the nontraditional things we did in our program.”

“I had left the meeting steamed up and found … continue reading

“Many of the opportunities you have in your life are generated by the energy you create around you.” —Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica

1: It’s Tuesday.  Time to take on the day.

There is, however, a hidden enemy working against us.

“Every time we switch tasks,” Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time, our “brains have to switch focus.”

The technical term for this is “context … continue reading

1: It feels like we are swimming in a sea of information.

“It’s become a ubiquitous modern problem to have not only a teetering pile of books we’ve been meaning to read, but a digital stack of articles we’d like to digest, plus a long queue of podcast episodes to listen to, videos or TV shows to watch, or videogames we’ve purchased and would love to play, if only we … 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