Personal Development for Smart People^TM

Today I added an articles archive to this blog which conveniently lists every article ever posted — all on a single page. This should make it much faster and easier for you to browse the archives, especially if you want to get a visual overview of the content with respect to your current personal […]

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 […]

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.
(Update 6/25/06:  […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

I just posted a new article in the free articles section called “The Medium vs. The Message.”
This article explores two different ways to think about your career: 1) the way most people seem to think about it (the medium), and 2) an alternative way to think about it (the message). Both perspectives are […]

Here’s a simple but powerful meditation exercise you may enjoy. Teaching you the basics of meditation is beyond the scope of this blog entry (maybe someone can post a comment with a link to a meditation primer for those who’ve never done it), but if you’re already familiar with it, I think you’ll find […]

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 to see […]

The recipient of The Strangest Secret CD (see this post for details) was Anthony Salter, who shared his inspiring story The Power of the Force.
Anthony explains that when he confronted his fears and moved towards his goals with resolve and action, the universe helped make his dream a reality.
I’ve seen this same pattern countless times […]