Exercise: Three Ways to Scale Down Background Scaling down helps you focus on the essentials and get the most important work done first. In the last exercise, I suggested you use a thought experiment to help you come up with a scaled-down version that you could get...
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...
A friend of mine once told me that she hated doing housecleaning. Rather than make herself clean on a schedule, she would clean only when she felt disgusted by something dirty. That would give her the motivation to clean up that area. This method worked for her for...
If you lack momentum on some project, that means your goal or the path to your goal is vague in some way. It is not enough to have a generalized idea of the outcome and the steps involved. You need clarity regarding how your steps will get you from here to there. If...
A member of the Thinking Lab asked me for advice on how to decide whether to join a small startup or stay with his very successful, stable, lucrative job at a large company. Let's call him Max. Max had done a lot of thinking about his choice, but he still had some...
Some people muddle together values and emotions when they discuss motivation. These are two very different (though causally related) phenomena. Some people get confused about the roles of thought and action in forming values and triggering emotions. I thought I'd sort...
It's easier to think at your desk than on your feet. Knowing this, you can make it easier to follow through on your own good intentions. Good intentions often fail when "something" comes up. For example, you intend to exercise at lunch, but then at 11:45 you see you...
In this series on happiness, I have distinguished short-term pleasures and temporary joys from true happiness. To be in a state of true happiness, you need to gain your values every day, week, month, and year. This requires not only that you accept facts of reality,...
Paralyzed. Stuck. Blocked. These describe a distressing mental state — made worse by mystery. When you are paralyzed, it seems like you know what you need to do — you need to write, plan, etc. But you feel like you can't take a single step forward. Knowing why you're...
Ayn Rand coined the catch phrase: "Check your premises." A premise is a past conclusion that supports your present thinking. Her point was that if you arrive at a contradiction in the present, there is an error somewhere in your past conclusions. You need to find that...
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