How to Win an Argument

This is a follow-up to the recent Dealing With Difficult Relatives post. That original post sets the context for this article, so if you haven’t read the original article, you should definitely do that first. Otherwise, you won’t likely understand the context for this post. If you expect this will be an article about how…

No Division

Ben Averch, a reader of this site, told me the post My Favorite Meditation really reasonated with him and inspired him to write a song called “No Division.” I thought it was wonderful, so I asked him if I could post it here to share it with everyone, and he said he’d be thrilled. Listen…

What Is Your Value?

Last Thursday I turned the subject of the article The Medium vs. the Message into a 20-minute speech, which I delivered to one of my Toastmasters clubs. At the beginning of the speech, I had everyone in the audience create a fake business card with their name and their current career listed on it. Then…

Dealing With Difficult Relatives

With regards to the post on Dealing With Difficult People, several commenters asked follow-up questions on how to deal with difficult relatives, such as an overbearing parent or in-law. The original post was written in terms of dealing with difficult people with whom you have a professional relationship, such as your boss or a co-worker.…

Podcasting

Podcasting is something I’ve been looking into lately, especially at the urgings of several readers. It was always my plan to add audio content to this site, but I wasn’t sure if podcasting would be an intelligent way to do it. I initially rejected the idea of podcasting for a variety of reasons (time, effort,…

The Medium vs. the Message

This article is designed to get you thinking about your life from a new perspective. For the sake of clarity, we’ll focus primarily on your career, but by the time you’re done reading, you should be able to apply these ideas to other areas of your life as well. Consider a physical recording medium like…

My Favorite Meditation

Here’s a simple but powerful meditation exercise you may enjoy. I didn’t learn this particular meditation from anyone else — it’s just something I made up at one point and have been doing for around 10 years now. First I get myself totally relaxed and into a peaceful state. Then I imagine a special room…

End Goals vs. Means Goals

A common goal-setting mistake (in my opinion) is to confuse end goals with means goals. End goals define outcomes where you’re unwilling to compromise — they describe exactly what you want. Means goals, on the other hand, define one of many paths to reach your end goals. Here’s a simple example: Let’s say you want…

The Power of the Force

My favorite expression of the Power of the Force is often mistakenly attributed to the German philosopher Goethe (1749-1832). The real source of this quote is complicated, but it’s a great passage nonetheless: Until one is committed, there is hesitancy. the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative (and creation). There…

You Need People

If you’re stuck living a life you wouldn’t have consciously chosen if you had it to do all over again, what can you realistically do about it? The Black Hole By “stuck” I mean truly, deeply stuck. You’ve got the stable job, the family, and the mortgage. But even though your situation looks pretty good…