When you make a marketing plan, or a 5-year strategic plan, or even just a plan to complete a complex project, you sometimes don't know much. You know what you wish would happen. You know some things you need to do so you can make that happen. Everything else is...
Perhaps the most important lesson I've learned in life is to treat struggle as an alarm that warrants your immediate, full attention. By "struggle," I mean "to proceed with great difficulty and effort." [Merriam-Webster] You struggle because the task is difficult...
A member of the Thinking Lab asked me to clarify how I reduce the size of my lists: "I was struck by your lists never having more than 7 things on them. This seems self-evident and also incomprehensible to me. What about stuff that you're not sure about that you don't...
If you want to do creative work at a high level, you need to spend significant time developing your skills. There is no substitute for practice. Some people would say you need self-discipline to develop the skills. Others would say you need self-control to put in...
Most advice on time management needs qualification. This caveat applies to the oft-heard advice to decide how long you will take for a task and then just do it in that time. This idea sounds appealing. Consider how much easier your life would be if you could simply...
Consciousness has identity. It is what it is. It can do some things and not others. Some aspects of it are directly introspectible, others can only be inferred. This is a fact that one learns in philosophy class. Knowing it helps you solve real-world problems whenever...
The Work of Happiness All Thinking Lab classes, bonus recordings, Thinking Day recordings, and Q&A call recordings will be posted to the podcast for this series as they occur until we finish up. You can either listen to the recordings in the embedded audio player...
Over the years, I have written several articles on how to do a mental cleanup when you need to stop a task prematurely to get started on something else. And I've also written about warming up your mental circuits to get started from a cold start. I reviewed how to...
By far, the primary influence on my work is Ayn Rand. Her philosophy infuses my entire approach and underlies all my conclusions. One important secondary influence is F.M. Alexander, the inventor of the Alexander Technique. The Alexander Technique is training in...
Every tactic is useful only in a context. That includes my favorite general-purpose workhorse, "thinking on paper." Sometimes it is more efficient to think in your head. Sometimes it is more efficient to discuss an issue with someone else. And sometimes it is more...
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