Category: Life
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Read your old journals
Writing a journal is nice, but it’s just as rewarding—maybe even moreso—to go back and read it. It’ll give you hints—or direct advice—when you feel confused. I highly recommend adding your own old journals to your reading list. One helpful technique is to combine sources—for example, you can look at a journal entry from 10…
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When you’re switching careers, don’t rush to a resolution
There’s a great piece of advice that Herminia Ibarra writes in Working Identity, which is to allow for a transition period between holding on to an old identity, and letting go of it and taking on a new one. She writes, “Better to live the contradictions than to come to a premature resolution.” This assurance…
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Say what needs to be said
It took Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau decades to learn to speak up, instead of stopping himself when something needed to be said. He writes, “For me, I kept telling myself I needed to err on the side of speaking up too much. Trust me, even with that, the end result is that on many occasions…
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Choosing how you feel
My friend Peter has been running Barrel, which has grown into Barrel Holdings, for 18 years. In the past, he’d constantly feel the worries of what could go wrong the following week, even on holidays. If you’re an entrepreneur or independent, you’ll know exactly what Peter means—when the buck stops with you, you’re ultimately responsible…
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You made it!
There’s a popular post circulating online that suggests men shouldn’t celebrate their birthdays because they—we!—should celebrate achievements, not existence. While I could relate to it, and I felt incredibly surprised as my perspective is the exact opposite, the main point I want to make is this: If you manage to make it another year around…
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Sheridan’s levels of autonomy
AI can easily take over generative creative work because that stage of work has a lot of room for making mistakes. In fact, you could say that mistakes are encouraged. Sometimes, an AI hallucination is the best thing that could happen to an idea. However, at some point in the creative work, there’s much less…
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One sitting vs. many sittings
When you commit to making something, and not stopping until you’re finished, you’re tapping into an incredibly powerful energy. This is the power of one sitting. It has the same energy as a sprint. For example, hackathons take this force to the extreme, stretching the time window out to a full day or two. If…
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Don’t overlook pain prevention
A father wanted to show his son how important it was to regulate his emotions. The son was given a rule: whenever he got upset, he would hammer a nail into their wooden fence. Initially, the son hammered a lot of nails, but the practice taught him to be more mindful of his temper. He…
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Letting go
Unlearning is an incredibly important skill. It’s also often, in my experience, much more difficult than learning. Part of that is probably because we go through decades of learning to acquire facts, lessons, and insights, but there isn’t much of a curriculum on unlearning beliefs and scripts. I’ve had some experience applying and practicing in…
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Advice for taking advice
The best advice comes with another person understanding you. In fact, the best advice could even originate from you. The other person isn’t forcing you into a solution; they genuinely want to understand the problem, and in the process of doing that, help you understand it better as well. They know how to ask you…