1: “Why is it so hard to let go?” Marilyn said.

Marilyn was ninety-six years old. A naturally curious person, she had engaged Diane Button, an end-of-life doula, because she wanted to die well.

“She was willing and even excited to do the work to make that happen,” Diane writes in her wonderful book What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living.

Initially, Marilyn told Diane … continue reading

How to Promote Calm: Science-Backed Breathing

1: Stress gets a bad name.

Like many things in life, the Goldilocks rule applies here.

Too much stress.  Not good.  In fact, it will kill us.

But too little stress is not good either.

To perform at our best, we want to harness stress and use it to our advantage.

Or as Goldilocks says, “Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.”

“Stress … continue reading

1: Ben Horowitz had been set up on a blind date by his friend and high school football teammate Claude Shaw.

It was the summer of 1986, and Ben had just finished his sophomore year of college at Columbia University and was living in Los Angeles with his father.

This would be a double date, and Ben and Claude decided to prepare an elaborate dinner for Claude’s girlfriend, Jackie Williams, … continue reading

1: “John D. Rockefeller was one of the most successful—and ruthless—businessmen in history,”Sahil Bloom writes in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

After growing up in humble, unstable circumstances, John built Standard Oil into “a gargantuan conglomerate with immense global reach and outsize influence in all manner of world affairs,” Sahil observes.

To put his wealth into perspective, by … continue reading

1: “We do not learn from experience,” John Dewey tells us.  “We learn from reflecting on experience.”

Yes, indeed.  

But life moves fast.  And without the right toolset, it’s easy to overlook the reflection piece and miss out on the learning.  

To address this problem, author Anne-Laure Le Cunff has developed a weekly process she calls “Plus Minus Next,” a simple yet powerful tool designed to spark reflection … continue reading

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: Is this person supportive? Ambivalent? Or demeaning?

How often do I interact with them—frequently or infrequently?

These are the two questions Sahil Bloom suggests we ask, as outlined in his book, The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

We begin by making a list of the key relationships in our lives.

“These can include family, friends, partner, or coworker relationships,” Sahil writes. “For … continue reading

“Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be right.” -Adam Phillips

1: “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of … continue reading

1: “I vividly recall the moment I realized I’d been overcomplicating my son’s fifth birthday party, which had come to feel like a significantly stressful undertaking,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

“What the stress really signaled, I saw, was that I cared about the project,” Oliver writes, “which is entirely different from saying that it … continue reading

1: Author and podcaster Sam Harris was at lunch with a friend.  

He remembers “moaning on about the various problems he was confronting in his work,” Oliver Burkeman writes in his book Meditations for Mortals.

Sam’s friend interrupted him mid-flow. “Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?” she asked.

Her question was jarring. It suddenly occurred to him that he “had … continue reading