Category: Life
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The Long Game of Kindness
Living creatures, by their nature, find it hard to think, plan, and act for the long term. For millennia life on this planet has survived because it acts, first and foremost, to do what it is best for it in the short term. This near-term greed allows living creatures to keep being alive, and that’s […]
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Why Kindness is Hard
I wrote last week about how important I think kindness is. And about how its truest form is a positve action rather than the mere absence of negative actions. That, and a few other things I’ve seen lately has lead me to get thinking a little bit about why this thing called kindness that we almost […]
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The Difference between Being Nice and Not Being Mean
If there’s one thing that I’m certain of its that there is a big difference between not being actively mean to someone and being kind to them. And yet for a long time I didn’t realize there was a difference. It not as though if you’d asked me if those two sequences of words had […]
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The Gap between the World We Want and the World We Have
Almost no one arises in the morning with a desire to wreak havoc in the world. (Psychopaths, not my enemies, are the reason I say “almost”.) And yet the world is very regularly judged “a mess”, even in places that no psychopath has been. Most people believe in “the Golden Rule”. Many would testify to […]
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Choosing Not To Change
One of the more valuable lessons I’ve learned in my life is that leaving things as they are is a choice as important and powerful as changing them. This never would have occurred to me five years ago, but it’s central to my understanding of who I am today and how this thing called life […]
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Life, Uncertainty, Courage
One of the harder-to-deny truths about life is that it’ll always contain uncertainty. We can, seeking solace from this fact, strive to minimize the number of things we don’t know. In doing so, we hope it allows us to act with greater confidence about the kind of outcomes we can expect. And indeed, the more […]
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Prioritizing the Truly Important
Whenever I start to think seriously about the obstacles to accomplishing goals and doing cool things, I always come back to a deceptively simple phrase I heard from Merlin Mann: “First, care.” (His essay of that name is super short and worthy of your time. Even if you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again.) […]
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How Fear Blocks Action
We’ve all got it: a list of things we hope to do. In some ways it’s a great thing to have. We can carry around this list and it gives us hope of a future brighter than today. When we finally write that novel, or make that movie, or start that business or painting, then […]
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Decreasing Fear by Increasing Trust
The thing about fear is that you feel it. Every part of your body is animated when you’re afraid. There’s a sound reason for this: you’re probably scared because you’re in danger. You’re probably in danger because something bigger, stronger, or more powerful than you is threatening. And in the face of this threat you’d […]
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Moving Beyond the Fear Mindset
In a contemplative mood last night, I made a few tweets about fear: Most things we don’t accomplish in life have one root cause: fear. We fear failure, success, humiliation, poverty, etc so much we don’t try. Most cruelty is a reaction to fear. Few harsh actions come from a place that isn’t afraid of […]