Lessons from an Errant Rocket Ship

From time to time, it’s good to be reminded of your insignificance. Last week provided an opportunity in the form of a Chinese rocket that was falling to the earth. Perhaps you heard about it. Thankfully, all was well in the end, but until it landed, no one knew where the rocket would touch down. It could have been anywhere on earth! Just think...

May 2021

Do Hard Things Because They Are Hard

Last week I went to Utah to run an unusual marathon. My time was well over two hours slower than any marathon I’ve done, but that was by design—I was running with someone who was doing a series of extreme events back-to-back, every day for 100 days in a row. The pace, therefore, was slow. His name is James Lawrence, more popularly known...

Apr 2021

The Present-Day Time Machine

“Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.” -Lin-Manuel Miranda, from Hamilton of course— Most of us can think of times in our lives that we’d like to relive. Some of these memories may consist of experiences we’d like to redo—those things we wish we could go back and change. Other memories, however, are so pleasant that we wish...

Apr 2021

Regret Is an Unreliable Emotion

I have long believed that thinking about regret is a powerful motivator for action. When you’re feeling indecisive, trying to figure out if a particular step is a good one, consider how you’ll feel if you don’t take the step. Often this leads you to what seems like the right direction. But while mental models can be helpful, most of them also...

Mar 2021

The Greatest Story Ever Sold 💵

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how money mistakes are temporary. My main argument was that unlike other kinds of mistakes, money mistakes rarely have permanent consequences. I’ll return to that in this post, but first let’s consider a few things that have happened this month: We’ve all been hearing about NFTs, also known as “non-fungible...

Mar 2021

Money Mistakes Are Temporary

A common TV trope features someone who’s down on their luck and forced to borrow from someone with questionable moral scruples: a loan shark, the Mafia, a representative from Wells Fargo. As fate would have it, they fall further and further behind, until they’re in an even greater bind. Soon they’re being pursued by the loan shark, who threatens...

Feb 2021

Travel Hacking Opportunity: Easy Way for Small Business Owners to Earn 110,000 Points

Link: 110,000 Point Bonus Offer (Must have an LLC or S-Corp) UPDATE: This offer has ended. I’ll update the post if it returns!— I haven’t been writing much about travel recently, for reasons that are probably obvious. Travel doesn’t exist at the moment! At least not in the same way it used to. But it will again, especially with...

Feb 2021

Do This When You Visit a New Place

Pandemic life has taught many of us to appreciate moments in life that might otherwise pass us by. I’ve been trying to pause and take note of how I feel at the end of the day, often as I walk in the park or one of my nearby neighborhoods. With that in mind, here’s a tip inspired by The Art of Stopping Time, a book by Pedram Shojai: whenever you visit...

Dec 2020

How to Conduct an Annual Review (2020 Edition!) 🗓

Every December for the past fifteen years, I’ve completed an exercise I call the Annual Review. This year is different in some ways, but then again, so is every year for one reason or another. In fact, that’s one of the things that’s so beneficial about the Review: in the midst of whatever craziness is happening, it helps to ground your attention and...

Dec 2020

Thank you, 2020. It was terrible and wonderful.

I started writing this post by trying to take stock of a few things about this year that were good. The process was easier than I expected. Sure, 2020 has been a dumpster fire year in many ways. But when I really stopped to think about it, it wasn’t hard to identify several things in my life that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the world coming...

Dec 2020