Happiness: An Outcome of Personal Effort

American author Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in her “cutesy” memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in […]

How Free You are in Your Mind

Sereno Sky writes in Lonely Traveller (2014,) “Where you’re from?” Her eyes were staring at me while she was trying to figure me out. “I’m from a place called ‘Freeland.’” I could feel that she was almost excpecting some sort of trippy answer like that. “I’ve heard about it. But does it really exist?” Apparently […]

Admonition That Sets Kids Up for Failure

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Melon computer scince professor whose last lecture inspired millions writes in his The Last Lecture (2008): Once, about a dozen years ago, when Chris was seven years old and Laura was nine, I picked them up in my brand-new Volkswagen Cabrio convertible. “Be careful in Uncle Randy’s new car,” my sister […]

The Dream of Life

Tibetan Buddhist nun Khandro Rinpoche writes in Buddha’s Daughters: Teachings from Women Who are Shaping Buddhism in the West (2014): When we look back, at the time of death, the experience of this life will seem like a dream. And – just as with our nighttime dreams – it will seem useless to have put […]

Delegate Authority, Raise Leaders

Pastor Craig Groeschel on delegation: If you delegate tasks, you will raise up doers. If you delegate authority, you will raise up leaders.

The Power of Focus

Sales leadership trainer Steve Keating writes that many of the greatest achievements in life reqire unremitting attention to purpose: If you can’t say no to many things then you’ll find it impossible to say yes to focus. In most areas of your life what you choose not to do will determine what you are able […]

The “Beta Leader”

In Flex: The Art and Science of Leadership in a Changing World (2019,) leadership consultant Jeffrey Hull on being a “beta leader”: Beta is a shift in mind-set from a goal-oriented, top-down figuration to a growth-oriented, process-based one. When we live in beta, we are in flux, always improving, and always aware of the need […]

Start Where You Are

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes in Comfortable with Uncertainty (2002): Start where you are. This is very important. Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you get it all together and you’re this person you really respect. You may be the most violent person in the world – that’s a fine […]

How Private Jets and Business Class Hurt the Environment

With the climate conversation becoming ever more heated, the Economist looks at the impact of flying in business class and the use of private jets: First, private jets are horribly polluting. Second, they are often—and outrageously—subsidised. … new booking services and shared-ownership schemes are cutting the cost of going private and luring busy executives away […]

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the limitations of reason in the New Yorker: Confirmation bias—the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth […]