Image by Claire May Few things are more defining in life than one’s relationship with failure, and up until a few years ago I had it all wrong. Being somewhat obsessed with perfect execution, failure has always acted like a poison that seeped into the food and air supply where I failed. Failure revealed to me, and to…
Books Everyone Should Read
There are many of these types of lists, but here are some of my favorites. Books Everyone Should Read (Visualization). The Greatest Books Link …and my favorites in non-fiction: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior — My favorite book on the merging of Evolutionary Psychology with marketing and personality. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human…
The Freedom to Suffer
I think a lot about human suffering and how best to reduce it. I particularly enjoy mixing this effort with various political philosophies, such as progressivism, or “libertarianism”, or “communitarianism”. More on those later. For now I want to simply ask a few questions that have appeared to me after reading The Fall of the American Worker by…
The Future of Happiness
In a recent conversation with a co-worker I had the opportunity to explore the potential endgame for human happiness. That’s a strange sentence; let’s try to unpack it. The conversation started with free will, as so many of my favorites do, and he accepted my argument instantly. He hadn’t considered it before, but instantly accepted it as true.…
The Difference Between Pursuing Happiness and Pursuing Meaning
This is a brilliant piece about the difference between happiness and meaning, or, more specifically, the difference between pursuing a happy life vs. pursuing a meaningful life. I suggest you read the entire thing, but here are some choice pieces of it. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables — like stress levels, spending…
Life, Friendship, and Ambition
They say you are a composite of your closest friends, and given my ambition I often grapple with a balance between seeking to surround myself with those with similar goals and those who I’ve been close with for many decades. On one side I have a clear path to significant improvement through association with those who value self-improvement…
This Essay Might Improve Your Life
This is an essay about being productive to the world around you. Confused, you say, “How does any of that fucking matter when my (wife/husband/best friend/parent) is lying here bleeding! I need somebody who knows how to operate on bullet wounds! Can you do that or not?!?” Now the man becomes agitated — why are you being shallow…
Avoid Junk Information Like You Avoid Junk Food
Smart, educated people tend to avoid junk food. They tend to be thinner and have better diets because they’re simply more aware of the downsides of eating crap, including the negative effect it has on productivity. It should be the same for junk information. This includes not just television shows and entertainment news, but more stealthy forms of…
Planned vs. Random Leisure
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the habits of productive people. When I say productive I mean successful–as in setting out to accomplish something and then doing it. I’ll put up Paul Graham and Sam Harris as examples. They produce. They spend very little time on random enjoyment. They plan their fun, and that fun comes in…
The Graph All High School English Teachers Should Mount in Their Classrooms
[ The graph’s x-axis shows the GSS WORDSUM score, which is a vocabulary-based intelligence proxy (correlated at .71). The y-axis shows percentage of people with that score. ] Given how little Americans value education today I think it’s a good idea to empirically demonstrate to our youth that intelligence (as proxied by vocabulary) does actually correlate to dollars.…
Mandatory States for Human Happiness
I’ve been thinking recently about what states of being are required for optimum health. A few things bring this on: 1) Paul Graham’s writing on how he manages inputs and controls distractions has always penetrated deeply for me, and 2) when I find myself without options for inputs I fiercely enjoy the resulting silence and thought. To say…
A Potential Issue With Immersive Fantasy Games
I’ve been a role-player since junior high school, and I have been a reader of non-fiction long before that. I have a group of friends from junior high that still game (role-playing), and I noticed over the last couple of years that there was something very negative about it for me. I haven’t been able to capture it…
Happiness, Struggle, and Options
I think a lot about why people aren’t happy. I’m reading a book now by Bertrand Russell that offers a compelling theory: Modern people are unhappy because we have too many options and we don’t truly have to struggle for anything. To summarize: In the past (when we didn’t live in massive cities and have everything provided to…
Options as the Main Cause of Unhappiness
I’m reading a Bertrand Russell book right now that talks about happiness and how to achieve it in the modern world. One of his main points, which I think is excellent, is that modern, first-world people are unhappy because our basic necessities are met, and that the struggle for those (and the achievement of them) was what made…
Happiness: Creation vs. Collection
I have an observation that I’ve been mulling for the last few days: unhealthy people collect things. Healthy people create things. Naturally, statements like these always pivot on definitions, so when I say “healthy” here, I mean people who generally like themselves and feel happy about where they are in life. This isn’t to say that all people…
Harry Potter and the Extension of Reality
This will be a strange post. I just finished the Harry Potter series, and I’m a bit overwhelmed. I’m quite sure it’s the best series I’ve ever read in many ways. Not in all ways, but in many. Perhaps in most that matter. Anyway, I’ll come back to that later; that’s not the important part. While reading it…
One of Life’s Harshest Realities
There are many harsh things about life. The one people grapple with most is death, of course, but I see another that’s worse in many ways. It’s horribly unfair that we usually cannot live near our friends. When we are children we are stripped from close relationships because our parents had to move, or because their parents had…
The Bimbo And The Caveman: Relationships vs. Nature
Have you ever noticed that the more intelligent a man is the less masculine he tends to be? And doesn’t it seem like the smarter a woman is the less feminine she is? Why is that? The answer to that question, along with the implications thereof, constitute no less than the keys to relationship bliss. The basic explanation…
Great vs. Better: The Eternal Quest For Enough
For most people of a materialistic nature, “better” is always superior to great. This is a problem because there’s always something better. If there isn’t now, it’ll be out in six months. So if you ever want to be happy, focus on what you have that’s “great”, and forget about what could be an improvement over it. Another…
Addicted To Better
If you’re like me (which you likely are since you’re reading this), you’re probably obsessed with GTD, Lifehacker, 43 Folders, and a number of other productivity/optimization resources. I love this stuff. It’s downright exhilerating to pursue betterment in all these various forms. Diet, speed-reading, excercise, personal organizers, operating system tools and tweaks, etc. — all these areas offer…
Get Tired
I think that in an ideal lifestyle, one should be both mentally and physically tired when laying down to sleep each night. I have no evidence to support this, but I am sure it is more healthy to push both the body and mind daily. In addition to being healthy, one can also accomplish more by doing so.…
Life As A Game
When one looks at life as a game, I would propose that one should not complain about the rules but instead focus on winning. Just because the rules are unfair and foolish doesn’t mean one can gain anything by pointing it out. Learn the rules and master them. Play the game and win. To focus on the stupidity…