What part of your life always seems to be on the back burner? Is it a certain relationship? A hobby you’ve always wanted to enjoy? A spiritual pursuit? Do you tell yourself that someday this part of your life will move to the front burner and become a priority? How will that actually happen? Back [...]

The harder I work, the luckier I get. – Samuel Goldwyn Arbeit Macht Frei is a slogan on a sign above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland (among other concentration camps used by the Nazis). It roughly translates as, “Work sets you free.” What the Nazis expressed with cruel irony, I say seriously. [...]

Ideas are always floating around, and it’s no big deal if you get a one-time idea and let it pass because you have some doubts about it. But if you keep pondering the same or similar ideas repeatedly, then take note of them. Acknowledge Recurring Ideas I find it helpful to verbally acknowledge when an [...]

While I normally write for people who are interested in improving their lives, I’m aware that many are committed to the opposite path. These people deliberately decline steps that would lead to measurable improvements. They prefer that everything goes wrong — for as long as possible. Sometimes they screw up and accidentally do something right. [...]

Even when you take the time to set clear goals, visualize success, and break big goals down into projects and action steps, it can be difficult to get yourself to take action consistently until your goal is 100% complete. Crossing the starting line is much easier than crossing the finish line. Your overall results in [...]

One of the big traps in life is believing that you’re making progress when there’s no actual evidence of it. It’s easy to keep learning and studying new ideas, methods, and techniques that don’t improve your results… while convincing yourself that you must be making progress simply because you’ve invested a lot of time and [...]

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those [...]

I recently discovered a nifty utility called MySpeed (for Windows and Mac) that lets you speed up the playback of online videos. I started using it last week, and now I can watch most online videos in half the time it used to take me. Obviously that’s a great time-saver. It doesn’t work for all [...]

Here’s a quick update about how my biphasic sleep trial is going. It’s been 9 days since I started. First off, adapting to biphasic sleep was really no big deal. Compared to the first week of polyphasic sleep, this was easier by at least an order of magnitude. I feel pretty well adapted to biphasic sleep [...]

There’s a big difference between completing a project and perfecting a project. Perfectionism frequently works against the drive for completion. A final work product doesn’t have to be perfect to produce strong results. However, the project must be essentially complete. A mediocre but complete film script can still be made into a movie. A beautifully [...]