Harness the power of habit to benefit you — Getting a kid to brush their teeth is annoying, it’s a hassle and without reminders they often skip it. But as adults we rarely forget. It’s odd to even think about not brushing our teeth, a sign of something going wrong if anything. …

We solve problems in a smarter way than we define them — Ostensibly smart people make dumb decisions because “smart” is a measure of intelligence not a measure of judgement. Good judgement is the application of knowledge, sophistication, and intelligence to facts. That’s what we think we do all the time but often times smart people use all their horsepower to effectively…

The correctness of your decisions should be independent of their outcomes — Making good decisions is not the same thing as achieving good outcomes because things are very rarely deterministic. It is impossible to predict with absolute certainty the outcome that will result from a particular decision. What we are really doing when we are making a “good decision”, ie a decision…

Discover the system — When we are figuring out what we want to do in order to be happy we often are told that we should focus on a long term outcome and work backwards from there. That makes perfect sense but it’s very difficult to actually do. It’s hard to stretch ourselves to…

Focus on your chance of success rather than risk of failing — Are you heading towards something or away from something? In other words are your actions driven by trying to achieve something or by trying to avoid something. If you’re a normal human being its very likely the latter, simply because we like clarity and it’s much more clear how to…

We are all very busy going nowhere — We do not have unlimited internal capacity to take care of all the demands made of us. However, there are two different measures of that capacity. One is the energy we have available and the other is the effort we can make. These sound very similar and they are certainly…

Acknowledge feelings, don’t accept actions — We use the word understanding all the time when we deal with other people. We say we understand someone when we want to show sympathy with the feelings that they are having in a particular situation: “I understand what you are feeling.”. We also use it when we refer to…

It is not about other people, it’s about your own self-worth — We often think of humility as not talking about our accomplishments or downplaying our successes. This is difficult to do because it isn’t natural. It feels false and inauthentic because it is. If the reality is that you did something well or successfully then why should you pretend you didn’t? …

Build the habit of responsibility by leaning into irresponsibility — We have many demands in our lives, things that we must do but don’t really gain any pleasure from. We also have desires in our lives, things that we actually enjoy or gain satisfaction from doing. We want to do the latter but feel forced to do the former. Unfortunately…