There is misinformation in your mental databanks. I guarantee it. Sometime in your personal history, you've overgeneralized or dropped context or missed something. Yet you rely on information from your mental databanks in all your thinking! How can you be sure you're...
Recovering a Benevolent Universe Perspective
Emotional resilience is your ability to recover a benevolent universe perspective after experiencing distressing emotions. After an incident that draws your attention to threats, problems, and difficulties, can you get back to seeing the world as filled with your...
Plan to Percolate
I often spend an hour pre-thinking about a topic before I "need to," not because I'm pressed for time, or because it's new material, but solely to allow me to percolate. Planning to percolate is a good use of your brain. If you don't know what I mean by "percolate,"...
Resolve Conflict with the Golf Course Analogy
To resolve conflict, you need to understand the root cause. It's biological. We have two completely independent motivational systems. One system, traditionally called “motivation by love,” exists to motivate action toward values. A value in the psychological sense is...
Four Reasons Why Reviewing Written Goals Helps You Achieve Them
Here's a piece of advice you may know: Write down your top goals and re-read them every day. Simply implementing this daily review can make a significant difference in whether you achieve the goals. If this sounds like some kind of magical thinking, it's not....
What’s So Hard About Managing Time?
It's simple. "I need to manage my time" is a euphemism for "I am choosing not to spend time on important stuff." Sometimes the "important stuff" is work. Sometimes it's rest or recreation or relationships. But if you're dissatisfied with how you spend your time, your...
Exercise: Transforming Floundering into Action
Exercise: Transforming Floundering into Action Background Let's step back to talking about thinking in general. I like the analogy of a thinking to a train. A train of thought moves purposefully forward toward its destination. But unlike a real train, there are no...
Have a Default Way to Start Your Break
At the start of a break during the workday, I have the idiosyncratic practice of reading one paragraph of Ayn Rand’s non-fiction. This is an example of a highly tailored tactic to help with a problem that many people have: breaks take over the work day. Let me explain...
Exercise: How to Stop Flailing
Exercise: How to Stop Flailing Background Remember the "Road Runner" cartoons? Wile E. Coyote tries to catch Road Runner again and again, failing every time. You wouldn't find the cartoons funny if you were Mr. Coyote. When you find yourself putting in effort,...
Introspect So You Can Take Action
A member of the Thinking Lab came to a consult the other day to discuss a situation from work that was bothering him. I blithely suggested he needed introspective work — meaning he needed to identify the deep rational values at stake underlying his feelings. I suspect...