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Why You Can’t Stop Creating Problems in Your Mind

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Why You Can’t Stop Creating Problems in Your Mind We’re not built to be happy. We’re built to survive. Our brains are designed to worry, and they’re good at it. They’re built to determine the next big thing to “fix.” This is a great thing. It’s a cognitive feature that has led us to evolve the way we have. We’ve developed every major industry (agriculture, medicine, religion) out of some kind of fear: death, disorder, starvation, meaninglessness. The part of the brain that controls rumination also controls creativity.  There’s no coincidence in this. We were born to survive, which is to create. If you feel like you can’t stop worrying, can’t stop creating problems for yourself, can’t stop shifting your anxiety from one corner of your life to the next, can’t just sit back and enjoy and be grateful and happy, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong with your understanding of the human brain and happiness. We weren’t built to be “happy” in
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Five Steps to Changing Your Life

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Five Step s to Changing Your Life (they boil down to one thing) In the last three years, I’ve: lost 120 pounds, become debt free, earned an MFA, quadrupled my income, and sold a novel to a major publisher. Three years ago I knew something needed to change. A lot of somethings, really. I’d been published, by Penguin, a couple of years before. But my books had failed , my publisher dropped me, and I wasn’t writing. At all. For the first time since I was about ten years old, I was seriously considering just doing something else with my life. Only, I felt so sick, I wasn’t sure I ​could ​do something else with my life. I was in pain all of the time. I woke up every morning so exhausted that I just wanted to cry. I often did. I weighed 368 pounds and I was afraid for my mobility. I couldn’t stand long enough to make dinner. I couldn’t walk far enough to make it to the end of a parking lot. This is me at the point where I felt the absolute worst. I’m in New York City here, with my da
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Until You Have Better Work Habits, Productivity Apps Are Useless

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Until You Have Better Work Habits, Productivity Apps Are Useless "Being busy does not always mean real work.The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”  — Thomas A. Edison According to a recent McKinsey report, today’s workforce spends 61% of their time managing work rather than doing it. That’s insane. We can do better than that. There are hundreds, if not thousands of apps that promise to make you work smarter, better and even faster. A quick glance at the productivity section of any app store reveals thousands of options for various email, to-do, calendar, notes, workflow, and everything else apps. Many people spend a lot of productive time shifting between apps everyday without getting significant work done. The bitter truth is, until you have better work habits, that insanely great productivity app can’t
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3 Ways To Develop A Powerful Presence With Others

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Pursuing your dreams with a powerful intention and sense of purpose, requires a call from within yourself to activate that desire. The power of presence ignites your capacity to create a remarkable future by transforming that intention into future action. So what is this elusive thing called presence which people desire? I am frequently asked in seminars how to cultivate more presence in their lives. Firstly, let us define presence and examine why it is paramount for connecting with the authentic self. Consider the last time you attended a social gathering and met someone who exuded a mysterious quality. It may have been a distinctly attractive quality, perhaps a distinguished grace or a peaceful nature which drew you towards them. It may have been an elusive aspect which you were unable to quantify or it was merely they seemed comfortable in their own skin and aware of their surroundings. They might have moved about the room as if floating on thin air, while radiating an unmistakable
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An Easy Way To Get More Done Each Day

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An Easy Way To Get More Done Each Day It’s exactly 7:05am on Friday morning as I begin to write this article. I’ve been working for about an hour now and getting some good “early bird” stuff out of the way. The usual “things undone” from yesterdays workload, responding to emails, checking the news, my Linked In feed, Twitter, WhatsApp, Messenger etc. Regardless of when I finish writing this piece however, I know that at exactly 7:30am, I will be walking around the local High School for a good 10–15 minutes or so. That goes for whether this article comes out just the way I want it to, or it becomes drudgery and a mess I need to clean up. Either way, I don’t care. I’ll be walking in 25 minutes. The reason for this is both selfish and quite simple: It really does help me get more done each day. Here’s why… By 7:30am I will have been going at it and working hard for about 90 minutes. Besides the usual neck and posture related pains from sitting looking at a screen for most of my day,
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The One Routine Common to Billionaires, Icons and World-Class Performers

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The One Routine Common to Billionaires, Icons and World-Class Performers “We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” — Archilochus For the last few years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. During our recordings I absorbed a lot of their wisdom and my life improved in almost every area as a result of the lessons I could remember. But that was the tip of the iceberg. The majority of the gems were still lodged in thousands of pages of transcripts and hand-scribbled notes. More than anything, I longed for the chance to distill everything into a playbook. The result was my book Tools of Titans, the tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ of the billionaires, icons, and world-cl
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You Were Born To Thrive, Not To Play It Safe In Your Comfort Zone

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You Were Born To Thrive, Not To Play It Safe In Your Comfort Zone The Obstacle Is the Way “ My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.”  — Maya Angelou We are born to thrive, not to play it safe in our comfort zone. We avoid failure because it weakens our self-esteem — although failure is a prerequisite for success. How do you feel about this statement? What emotions come up as you contemplate its meaning? That is where you need to spend more time exploring your deepest self. Ask any entrepreneur or adventurer, and they will tell you failure is essential. However, I do not wish to embellish this article with positive psychology to make you feel good. So let’s cut to the truth since something drew you here, whether by accident or as a regular reader. For many, surviving means getting through the daily grind, only to endure the same battles over again. This is not living because we are need
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