1: Ever heard of the “effort paradox”?

It’s the reason most New Year’s resolutions fail.

We “overcommit to a bunch of lofty aspirations,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in her book Tiny Experiments. 

“The human mind has a love/hate relationship with effort,” she notes. “We are drawn to the idea of it, yet we would rather not have to put in actual effort.”

We think we will be happier if … continue reading

1: “Every morning, the writer faces a blank page, the painter an empty canvas, the innovator a dozen directions to go at once,” Steven Kotler writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer.

“There is something deeply exhausting about the year-in and year-out requirements of imagination,” he notes.

How do we overcome this daily challenge?

“The advice that has helped me solve this slog came from Nobel … continue reading