Personal Development for Smart People^TM

“I regret tomorrow more than yesterday” - from “Long Way Home” by ATB
The above is one of my favorite song lines.  Do you ever regret the future before it has even happened?
When you regret, fear, or worry about the future, you project your consciousness beyond the present moment.  Essentially you become unconscious because you lose awareness of the […]

Suppose your child misbehaves right in front of you, but you say nothing.  Or suppose you manage people at work, and you notice one of your underlings making a serious mistake, but you don’t bother to bring it to his/her attention.  That’s silent approval.
Obviously there are problems when using silent approval to reinforce negative results […]

Changing up your exercise routine is a great way to keep your workouts fun and interesting.  It’s easy to get bored if you stick to the same workout for too long.  Whenever you find that happening, it’s time to move on to something new.
The dominant exercise I’ve been doing for the past several years has been running.  […]

A great idea I learned from weight training is the concept of progressive training.  Progressive training means that you keep gradually increasing the weights you lift (over a period of weeks, months, and years), so you always experience a high degree of challenge in your training.  In broader terms progressive training means changing various aspects of your training […]

In yesterday’s post I noted that seemingly serious human problems like illness, divorce, and loss become trivial and common when you expand your perspective in time and space.  But if such human problems don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, then is human existence itself also trivial?  Is there a risk that broadening your […]

When you encounter a seemingly serious (but very common) human problem, it’s tempting to blow it all out of proportion and turn it into a major stumbling block that paralyzes you from moving forward.  Social conditioning teaches us that losing someone close to you, getting a divorce, or being diagnosed with cancer are huge, life-wrenching issues.  But […]

Social drag is what happens when you undergo a significant personal shift, yet everyone around you still treats you the same.  Suppose you’ve decided to switch careers.  Even though you’re still working in your old career, mentally you’ve already made the leap to the new one, and it’s only a matter of time before your external reality […]

I’m often asked which blogs I read, so here goes…
I actually subscribe to very few blog feeds, normally limiting myself to no more than 15.  I frequently add new feeds, but if they don’t prove their long-term value to me, I drop them just as fast.
Here are the current long-term survivors from my feed reader:
ProBlogger:  Darren Rowse’s […]

Yesterday’s post on strengths and weaknesses generated some interesting follow-up questions.  Much of it can be reduced to the following question, which certainly deserves an intelligent answer:
Isn’t it a bad idea to work on a weak area that you aren’t very good at?  Shouldn’t we spend more time working on our strengths and just accept our weaknesses?
In […]

One of the most important personal development principles is that your weakest area will limit your ability to take advantage of your strongest area.  The various parts of our lives — physical, mental, social, spiritual — are deeply interwoven, and we cannot simply consider each part in isolation.
People often identify themselves with their strongest area:  […]