5 Boring Ways to Become More Creative

Creativity and crazy. They go together like ginger and beer, aged cheese and fine wine, impressionist painters and lead poisoning. One can hardly think of one without the other. Almost by definition, creativity is the opposite of boring. If something is creative, it’s because it triggers some degree of surprise or excitement within us—it reconfigures...

2w

How to Get Better

Note: This was originally written for my weekly newsletter. You can sign up for it here.  Welcome to another Mindf*ck Monday, the only weekly newsletter where the ideas are as good as the jokes are bad. Each week, I send you three potentially life-changing ideas to help you be a slightly less awful human being. This week, we’re talking three popular...

3w

How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs

There’s an old allegory about a baby elephant that is tied to a fence post. As the baby elephant tugs and pulls, it fails to break the fence or break the rope. Eventually, it gives up and makes peace with its fate. The baby elephant is stuck.1 But eventually, the elephant grows up and becomes a big, adult elephant with gargantuan legs and a huge...

3w

The No-Bullshit Way to Find “The One”

So you want to find “the one” eh? You’re sick and tired of all the dating apps and websites and trying to meet people in your kickball league? And how many awkward first dates can you go on to find a “normal” person? And what’s with all the fake personalities and flaky people who seem more interested in themselves and can’t be bothered to make a slight...

3w

5 Common Beliefs that Can Subtly Screw You Over

Here’s the tricky thing with beliefs: we all think ours are correct. When actually, almost everything we believe, at some point in our lives, will eventually be at least partially wrong. Yet, we never think about this. After all, if we didn’t think our ideas were right, we wouldn’t believe in them! But our beliefs are never completely correct. In...

4w

It’s a Slow-Moving Car Wreck and We’re All In It

Im not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s an election going on. Seems like a pretty dull affair, to be honest. Not much to discuss. In a country that is the shining example for governmental efficiency and democratic representation for the rest of the world, I expect nothing but continued solidarity between political parties, not to mention widespread...

Oct 2020

How to Overcome Loneliness

In December of 2003, Joyce Vincent died of an apparent asthma attack in her north London flat. The television was left on. The mail continued to be delivered. Her rent was set up to be automatically deducted from her bank account. The days rolled by and no one noticed she was gone. Those days turned into weeks and the weeks into months. There were...

Oct 2020

The Law of Unintended Consequences

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake rattled the ocean floor off the coast of Japan. It was the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded. It was so powerful, it moved Japan’s main island by 2.4 meters. It shifted the Earth’s axis by about 10 centimeters and sped up the planet’s rotation by a few microseconds.1 The damage from the earthquake...

Oct 2020

The Best Way to Resolve Your Shame

Take a moment and think about something in your life that you are terrified of anyone knowing about you. It could be a belief, a personality trait, a sick desire, or some horrible failure in your past that you’d rather pretend never happened. Whatever it is, the thought of this thing being exposed mortifies you. It causes you to want to curl up in a...

Oct 2020

8 Logical Fallacies that Mess Us All Up

I’m going to be honest: most courses you take in university aren’t worth a whole lot. That’s not because the professors are bad or the coursework is pointless (although sometimes that is definitely the case). I mean that most of the courses you take will never be all that relevant to the rest of your life. But then, every once in a while, often by...

Sep 2020