I had an interesting conversation the other day with a Thinking Lab member who has hated his job off and on for a long time and wants to do something constructive about it. The key word here is “constructive.” People “hate” all kinds of things: the culture, how their families treat them, organizations they disapprove […]| Thinking Directions
One of my top life lessons learned is: if you want to create your dream life, you must stay ruthlessly committed to identifying and pursuing your top priority at each choice-point during the day. I call this “The Priorities Mindset.” It took me years to truly learn this lesson, and like all important life lessons, […]| Thinking Directions
A member of the Thinking Lab asked me for advice on how to decide whether to join a small startup or stay with his very successful, stable, lucrative job at a large company. Let’s call him Max. Max had done a lot of thinking about his choice, but he still had some nagging doubts. People […]| Thinking Directions
I was recently interviewed on the Yaron Brook Show on the topic of “Motivation by Love.” The main point of the interview is that it’s important to go deeper to understand the source of your motivation for any action. The fundamental motivation needs to be the desire to gain, keep, or create a value rather than […]| Thinking Directions
You already know what you need to know to complete most of the complex items on your To Do list. There’s just one problem. You can’t always access the information when you need it.[…]| Thinking Directions
The Thinking Lab is a membership program for ambitious people who believe their own mental skill is critical to help them rise to new challenges. They seek skills for developing: clarity, creativity, decisiveness, emotional resilience, and self-motivation.| Thinking Directions
When the desire for approval is driving many decisions, it is a “defense value.” It distorts your choices and actions and undercuts your successes and sense of self. Fortunately, this is a problem that can be remedied by taking an active approach to reprogramming your value hierarchy to eliminate this distortion. What is a defense […]| Thinking Directions
In helping some Thinking Labbers make accurate, precise value-judgments, I was reminded of a song I learned as a child. The lyrics as I remember: Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. I’m going out and eat worms! The first one was easy. The second one was greasy. The third one stuck in […]| Thinking Directions
In preparation for a new series of classes on “The Work of Happiness” in the Thinking Lab, I have been doing some high-level thinking about how you raise your baseline happiness. As I wrote in How Do You Measure Happiness?, your “baseline happiness” is the overall percentage of your waking time in which you are […]| Thinking Directions
I was recently asked to explain the difference between “emotional presence” and “self-esteem.” Emotional presence “Emotional presence” is an intense awareness of your values and their importance to you at the moment. You get it, not just from identifying your emotions, but from experiencing your love, grief, desire, and/or fear as you contemplate the deep […]| Thinking Directions
In the previous article in this series, I said that confidence is the emotion that proceeds from the conclusion that you have sufficient skill that your current or proposed effort will result in success. But if the task is at all difficult, how can you reach such a conclusion with certainty? And if you aren’t […]| Thinking Directions
After my recent article on defensiveness, I coached a member of the Thinking Lab who was concerned that productiveness was a defense value for him. He realized that he had a compulsion to prioritize getting things done over every other value — relationships, health, sanity, etc. He could see that he was driven to do […]| Thinking Directions
I aim to teach people to think clearly and logically about value-laden issues. As a means to this end, I exhort my Thinking Labbers to identify “deep rational values” [Footnote 1] at stake in every confusing situation. This is critical to your short- and long-term happiness. This term is introduced in the class on “Emotions […]| Thinking Directions
In a previous article, I argued that accepting reality gets you serenity. In this article, I will make a case that embracing causality gets you happiness. More exactly, my point is that consciously embracing the role of the causal agent of your own happiness is necessary to achieve an enduring happiness. Happiness, like every other […]| Thinking Directions
Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” That applies to happiness just as much as to the quality of automobiles that Toyota is producing. If you want to be happier, a good place to start is to make objective just how happy you are now. This takes some work. […]| Thinking Directions
In the last few articles, I’ve argued that a central purpose integrates your life, that it fits into a real life, that it needs to be a long-range productive goal, not something else, and how to identify your central purpose. I’ve asserted that it is important to a happy life. But how is that? Sometimes […]| Thinking Directions
Working out your central purpose is one of the most selfish things you can do. It has the biggest effect on your future and your happiness. It’s not a quick process. If you already have a general direction but need to clarify the personal significance for yourself, you may be able to sort it out […]| Thinking Directions
In the Launch Program and in my Thinking Lab courses on “Developing a Central Purpose” and “Evolving a Scheduling Infrastructure,” I advocate doing “daily thought work.” This means that you schedule 15-30 minutes every day to “think on paper” about a specific topic, and you keep it up for weeks or months. You may be wondering […]| Thinking Directions
