Category: Motivation

A few years ago, there was this tacky term that made everybody cringe but also made everybody drool with wonder: lifestyle design. (Okay, fine, it was like ten years ago and I’m officially ancient.) The term always annoyed me, because it was widely represented by a bunch of twenty-something hopefuls traveling the world with their laptops (okay, fine, it was me), and the whole thing just reeked of one big, cheesy platitude. Not to be confused with a cheese plate,

Does it bring you joy? Then out it goes, forever and ever. We have spent far too much time doing what’s merely convenient.

One of the most important jobs you have: keep your promises to yourself. It’s easy to make exceptions when no one’s going to notice; no one’s going to hold you to it; no one’s going to be angry if you don’t. It’s easy to say you’ll get to it tomorrow, or that it’s the least important priority on your list. But every time you tell yourself you’re going to take the jog, write the blog post, start the thing, try

The secret? You’re either going to commit to it or you’re not. Deciding is 100% of the decision. The rest is simply a (happy) consequence.

The other day, folks from around the world met me on Twitter, like thieves in the night, and shared the answer to one simple question: What’s your #middlefingerproject? You can read through the stream here, but I wanted to share a few here, today, because this is the point of everything. You. Me. Here. Supporting one another and figuring out how the hell to create these lives worth living, these projects worth pursuing, and these businesses worth running. Do not

You know what’s crazy? There’s not actually a team of people assigned to your life, sitting around monitoring your blood work, and your bank accounts, and the health of your relationships, jotting down notes, circling areas of concern. There’s no supervisor. No one checking your progress. No one setting quarterly reviews. As a result, we end up operating by a dangerous principle: out of sight, out of mind. We don’t worry about the stuff we can’t see. “Health.” “Financial security.”

I watched the movie AWOL last night, and the truth is, it was just an average movie. But I was fascinated by it. I was fascinated by it because the movie is set in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and everything from the trailer to working at the ice cream stand was the spitting image of a life I once knew so intimately. It was like stepping back in time—the junk yard pick up truck; the boozy men; the

You don’t have to choose, you know. You can be intelligent…and sensual. Extroverted…and introverted. Complex…and simple. You…and someone who’s evolving into someone else. Sometimes, in an effort to finally define who the fuck we are, we start putting ourselves into the little boxes voluntarily—the same ones that we spent our earlier years trying to escape. It gives us relief, to be in a box. To have an identity. To know something with certainty. And to be able to say, with