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: We get mixed up.
Means, ends, and by-products are not the same thing.
“A profound distinction is concealed among those prosaic terms,” Panera Bread Company founder Ron Shaich writes in his powerful book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, “one that unlocks the code to designing a business and a life of enduring value.”
Exhibit one: Ron’s friend who has type 1 diabetes.
“He wants … continue reading
“Almost everything that happens is either a good time or a good story.”
1: It was the weekend. The family drove into the countryside for a picnic.
“Just as they’d laid an impressive lunch spread on the blanket,”  Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals, “the heavens opened, but on this occasion, the parents let the kids eat anyway, in a pandemonium of wet sandwiches and laughter.”
This experience … continue reading
1: “To create anything of value—whether it’s a product, a company, a society, or a life,” Ron Shaich writes in his powerful book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, “we must push through our default settings.”
How do we do that?
“By living consciously and deliberately, by making the hard choices, and by using tools … to discover what will really matter, again and again.”… continue reading
1: Psychologists and mental health professionals call it “hurry sickness.”
They label it a disease. And it’s an epidemic in our modern world, John Mark Comer writes in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
Hurry sickness is defined as “A behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness.”
And: “A malaise in which a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task faster and to … 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
1: Gay Hendricks had just delivered his first speech to a professional audience.
A man approached the podium and said, “I really enjoyed your talk. It wasn’t so much what you said but the way you said it,” Gay writes in his book The Genius Zone.
Gay had always been nervous about public speaking, so the compliment lit him up. “What did you like about the way I spoke?” … continue reading
1: Author Gay Hendricks received a text from a member of his extended family.
A family member was asking “for a loan of several thousand dollars for extra holiday expenses and to pay a tax lien,” Gay writes in his book The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity.
“Based on her dismal record of repaying past loans (zero for five over … 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: “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
