The Virtue of Delayed Gratification

What do Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and just about any other “ism” that’s survived more than a few Kool-Aid chugging parties have in common? No, it’s not that they feature old guys dressed up in togas. No, it’s not that they all rip off each other’s myths and verses. No, it’s not that they spent thousands...

Mar 2021

Why I Am Not a Stoic

Ever since the release of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck back in 2016, many people have compared my work to Stoicism. Some have even gone as far as to say that my work is merely regurgitating Stoicism with a couple cool stories and F-bombs thrown in to spice things up. Initially, I found this amusing. I had read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations...

Feb 2021

The Levels of Eye Contact

Eye contact is important, especially in dating and gauging people’s attraction to you. Everyone should have a basic understanding of what each person is eye-coding to them in any given situation, and it doesn’t take a cryptographer to figure it out. Or if it does, then fuck it, I’m that cryptographer. In this article, I will decrypt the 11 levels...

Feb 2021

Fuck Your Perfectionism

I’ve got a friend who used to proudly proclaim he was a perfectionist every chance he got. He took pride in it. If something in his immediate environment wasn’t “right,” he would set out to fix it, almost reflexively. He had incredibly high standards for what he considered acceptable, both for the people around him and especially for himself. It made...

Jan 2021

The Surprising Science of Goal Setting (And Why You’re Probably Doing It Wrong)

Back in 2010, I set a bold goal for myself. I took one of my websites and decided that I wanted to publish over 100 articles on it that year. I decided that by doing this, my goal was to accumulate more than a million readers by the end of the year. To do this, I decided to take what, at the time, had been a modestly successful blog, and turn it...

Jan 2021

7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose

One day, when my brother was 18, he waltzed into the living room and proudly announced to my mother and me that one day he was going to be a senator. My mom probably gave him the “That’s nice, dear,” treatment while I’m sure I was distracted by a bowl of Cheerios or something. But for fifteen years, this purpose informed all of my brother’s life...

Dec 2020

1,273 People Share Their Best Life Lessons from 2020

We will remember this year for the rest of our lives. We will tell people decades from now, “This is what I did in 2020. This is who I was. This is what changed.” A couple weeks ago, I reached out to my email list and asked, “What have been your biggest lessons from 2020?” Over a thousand people replied, some with multiple pages of thoughts and...

Dec 2020

The Fear of the Unknown

Back in the spring of 2020, we each got a front-row seat to the wonders of the human capacity to cope with rampant uncertainty. Within weeks, people developed wild and unhinged beliefs about the virus, health care workers, their leaders and their countries. Some rebelled and channeled their angst outward. Crime spiked. Protests raged across the world....

Dec 2020

25 Tips For Learning A Foreign Language

When I arrived in Buenos Aires in the beginning of 2010, I could barely order food in a local restaurant. Two years later, I calmly explained the mechanics of Russian grammar to a Guatemalan friend… in her native Spanish. Today, I’m conversationally fluent in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, and low conversational in Russian. I’m not going...

Dec 2020

Why Some Dreams Should Not Be Pursued

Recently, a friend of mine met a woman while on vacation in another country. They had immediate chemistry and decided to keep in touch after he left. As the months passed by, he became more and more enamored with her, telling me that he had never met a woman like this before. He said he hadn’t felt this way since he met his last serious ex. Apparently,...

Dec 2020