If you’re alive,
if you have a roof over your head,
if you have food and water,
if you have friends and family who you love and love you back,
if you have all or any combinations of these things: congratulations, you’ve already won the lottery multiple times over.
By all means, keep pursuing your goals, but don’t deprive yourself of savoring and appreciating what you have along the way.
Listening more enables you to maximize the inflow of information.
Talking less gives you the processing power to parse the information and understand what’s going on.
High information inflow and comprehension enable you to be more confident and decisive about what course of action to take next.
Listen more, talk less, make (better) decisions.
The fear of failure can sometimes function like a paralytic that stops you from taking action.
A possibly effective way to subdue your fear of failure is to give yourself permission to fail at the outset.
Permission to fail shouldn’t be confused with the expectation of failure, resignation, or a…
Here is a simple heuristic to determine what to do, delegate, and drop:
If it will matter in the long run and you’re the best person to do it, do.
If it will matter in the long run but you’re not the best person to do it, delegate.
If it does not matter in the long run, drop it (as fast as you can).
You might be wondering: what does it mean for something to matter? That’s entirely up to you and what you value.
The only way to compete with a world that is ruthlessly seeking to grab your attention is to be equally ruthless with where you choose to pay attention.
The feeling that there are a million things to do yet not enough time to do them can be both overwhelming and even paralyzing at times.
An effective way to address this experience is by adding the dimension of time:
Try going through the list of things you feel like…
In printing, resolution is described as dots per inch or DPI.
For text documents, 150 DPI is usually good enough.
For customer-facing documents like posters and brochures where image quality is a priority, it’s normal to double the DPI up to 300.
In use cases where even higher resolution images…
Recent findings published by American market research and analytics company, The Harris Poll, revealed that one-third of Americans realized during the pandemic that they were mentally and emotionally stronger than they originally thought.
Along with new-found strength, were other encouraging themes such as a heightened sense of gratitude, the discovery…
5 days before a vacation with friends was set to conclude, I remember speaking with one of my friends about what time we should head to the airport when the trip is over.
Another friend who overheard our discussion remarked: “it’s too early to be spending time worrying about this…
Every failure is an opportunity to learn.
Every lesson learned is a moment of growth.
Every time you grow, you increase your chance of succeeding in whatever it is you’re pursuing.
Failure, when leveraged, is merely a synonym for growth.
Having said that…
Some days, you will be able to champion failure and get value from it.
Other days, you might find the feeling of failure will be so overwhelming that you can even begin to think about how you can learn from it.
Give yourself permission to experience both, and take breaks when you need them.
An hour of Netflix won’t hurt you.
Growth is a long game.
Feeling stuck? Step away from the problem.
Running out of ideas? Step away from the problem.
Exhausted and frustrated? Step away from the problem.
There’s plenty of research in favor of stepping away from a problem, relaxing your attention, and allowing the mind to wander. Some key benefits include increased creativity, enhanced learning, and enhanced working memory capabilities.
Though it might seem counterintuitive, sometimes the best thing you can do if you want to solve a problem is to temporarily step away from it.
William Liao
Taiwanese American, daily blogger of ideas about impactful work in service of others, photographer (ephemera.photography)
