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May 7, 2020 - July 27, 2021
If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers.
How often do we find ourselves in this position? You’ve worked incredibly hard on something, only to discover that it leaves you feeling empty.
Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse and author who spent several years working in palliative care with patients in the last weeks of their lives, recorded her patients’ top five regrets. The number one regret was that people wished they had stayed true to themselves.
Intentionality is the power of the mind to direct itself toward that which it finds meaningful and take action toward that end.
Leading an intentional life is about keeping your actions aligned with your beliefs. It’s about penning a story that you believe in and that you can be proud of.
Studies have suggested that we have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day.8
For most of us, “being busy” is code for being functionally overwhelmed. What do I mean by that? We don’t have time because we’re working on a lot of things, yet things aren’t working out a lot of the time. This phenomenon isn’t just a twenty-first-century problem, but it has been exponentially exacerbated by the countless number of choices technology has put at our fingertips. Should we type, text, call, email, swipe, pin, tweet, Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Message, or yell at our digital assistant to get it done, whatever it is? And in what order should all of that happen? (Oh, and before we can
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Left unchecked, decision fatigue can lead to decision avoidance.
We need to reduce the number of decisions we burden ourselves with so we can focus on what matters.
We’re so busy with all the things we’re doing (or should be doing) that we forget to ask ourselves why we’re doing these things.
In a cut-and-paste world that celebrates speed, we often mistake convenience for efficiency.
Chances are you haven’t completed them all. This is totally normal. Transform any guilt into curiosity by asking yourself why each Task might still be incomplete.
For everything we say yes to, we’re saying no to something else. Migration gives you an opportunity to recommit to what matters and let go of what does not. As Bruce Lee once said, “It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away the unessential.”
we’re pretty lousy at guessing how something will make us feel, thanks to a phenomenon known as impact bias: “the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.”28 In essence, we chronically underestimate our ability to adapt.
happiness can’t be owned.
eudaimonism, “a moral philosophy that defines right action as that which leads to the ‘well-being’ of the individual.”31 This idea of contented well-being as simply a by-product of personal industry is a recurring theme in a variety of philosophical traditions
“Your ikigai is at the intersection of what you are good at and what you love doing,”
it’s in the pursuit of what is meaningful that happiness seems most likely to appear. As Viktor Frankl put it, “Happiness cannot be pursued, it can only ensue.”34
Of all the challenges you’ll face along the way, endurance often proves to be the most cunning and lethal adversary.
In an “all-or-nothing” world, we tend to forget the power of something.
The key to creating flow is balancing the challenge of a task with your skill level.
It’s when we exhaust our stock answers that we begin to dig into our daily experience for material. It helps us become more present.
It’s within our power to be intentional about how we respond to the wildly creative problems the world, people, and even our emotions subject us to.
Self-compassion can start by asking yourself a simple question: What would I tell a friend in this situation?
Joshua Fields Millburn of the Minimalists once quipped, “You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”53
Sam Cawthorn, founder of Speakers Tribe, once said, “The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything, but they make the most of everything.”
We’re apt to lose our objectivity when we’re spinning our wheels. By explaining a problem in detail to someone (or something) else, we’re forced to change our perspective, viewing it from above, so to speak,
One could argue that perfection only exists in the intangible concepts, theories, and beliefs used to define the ideal, the permanent, and the divine. Why am I belaboring this point? Because the idea of perfection all too often sabotages our ability to become who we have the potential to be.
Wabi-sabi posits that the beauty of an object is found in its imperfection.
W. L. Sheldon purportedly wrote: “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
“wake the page.” That’s the term I use to describe the act of marking the page for the first time. It’s the moment when thought transcends the distance between our inner and outer world, and we breathe life into our ideas.
Dieter Rams, the industrial designer behind some of the most iconic radios, shavers, and numerous other household objects (some of which are rumored to have inspired the design of the original iPod), used to say wenniger aber besser, which loosely translates into “less, but better.”
Form should never obscure function.
A well-designed Collection will remain informative long after it has served its purpose.
