Life Is Better When We Focus on What We Appreciate, Not What’s Lacking “Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.” ~Rasheed Ogunlaru Recently a friend told me a story about taking her seven-year-old to the circus. It was a wonderful mother-daughter outing. They had the best time. After this magical afternoon, as the two of them were leaving, my friend’s daughter spied the merchandise stand and wanted her mum to buy her a plastic fairy wand. In the car on the way home, her daughter was quiet. “What did you like the most? She was sulking. I’m just thinking about the wand I didn’t get. How many of us fixate on the wands we didn’t get, even amidst the most wonderful experiences? How often do we hone in on the one negative comment, or the thing that isn’t right instead of what is positive or right? How can we just see what is rather than disproportionately focusing on what isn’t? For myself, the wands I didn’t get loom most darkly now that we are in the age of the Internet. I read reviews like others might read a newspaper. Here are my rules:
How to Be Present and Peaceful When You Can't Stop Thinking “Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.” ~Eckhart Tolle When I first started practicing Zen (or presence), I used to believe I could become completely thoughtless. Making my bed, no-thought. Washing my hands, no-thought. But it wasn’t like what I thought it would be. The reality is my mind was on full throttle all the time. In a panic, I thought about all those concepts I'd learned. The harder I forced myself, the noisier my mind became. During my first few years of practicing Zen and meditation, I was never at peace. As I learned more about spirituality, I finally found the answer. Here is what I learned, and how you can do the same. 1. It’s human to have thoughts. Just like our eyes see, our ears hear, our nose smells, our tongue tastes, and our body feels, our mind thinks. When I tried to stop my mind, I was actually doing the impossible. 2. A quiet mind is not a mind with no thoughts. So don’t resist your thoughts. 3. I love to hike. 4. 5.
Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss Kim Scott, co-founder of Candor, Inc., has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She first tried it at her own software startup. Then, as a long-time director at Google, she studied how the company’s leaders created an environment where the joy that people took in their work felt almost tangible. As a faculty member at Apple University, Scott learned how Apple takes a different path but is equally committed to creating the conditions where people can do the best work of their careers and love doing it. The good news is that Scott, now an acclaimed advisor for companies like Twitter, Shyp, Rolltape, and Qualtrics, has spent years distilling her experiences into some simple ideas you can use to help the people who work for you love their jobs and do great work. The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance: giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it.
‘What’s the point of a risk-free life?’ – Deborah Levy on starting again at 50 | Books As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story. One January night I was eating coconut rice and fish in a bar on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. A tanned, tattooed American man sat at the table next to me. He was in his late 40s, big muscled arms, his silver hair pinned into a bun. Her conversation was interesting, intense and strange. He said, “You talk a lot don’t you?” It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else. Everything was calm. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Life falls apart. I am not sure I have often witnessed love that achieves all of these things, so perhaps this ideal is fated to be a phantom.
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31 Forgotten Native American Herbal Remedies That Work Better Than The Pills – 101 Gardener Maybe you are one of those who deem that the herbal remedies are not as useful as pharmaceutical ones, but the real truth is that these herbal remedies have been well-rooted in the Native American remedial practice for centuries. The Native Americans have developed ‘a wheel’ of herbal and fruit medicines, very similar to the yin & yang of Asian medicine. Actually, the application of herbal remedies [including alternative forms of disease treatment] was ‘cutting-the-edge medicine’ of their day. Here below we reveal a long list of indigenous trees, plants, fruits, and flowers endemic to the North American continent (that is to the northern subcontinent of the Americas). That’s why it is very important to keep and read these ancient Indian records. To be quite honest with you, nobody knows how exactly the Native Americans sorted out which plants have medicinal properties although ‘trial and error’ was probably one possible approach. Here is the list: 1.Alfalfa 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
24 Cognitive Biases You Need To Stop Making [Infographic] How To Solve A Rubik's Cube In Five Seconds The maximum number of face turns needed to solve the classic Rubik's cube is 20, and the maximum number of quarter turns is 26. It took 30 years to discover these numbers, which were finally proved by Tomas Rokicki and Morley Davidson using a mixture of mathematics and computer calculation. (The puzzle does have 43 quintillion possible configurations after all.) So how did the current world-record holder SeungBeom Cho manage to solve Rubik's cube in under five seconds? Six Deals You Should Know About In Australia Today G'day!
107 free online courses from the best colleges in the US â including Princeton, Harvard, and Yale What’s Next for Humanity: Automation, New Morality and a ‘Global Useless Class’ It took centuries, even thousands of years, for us to reap the rewards of decisions made by our forebears, for example, growing wheat that led to the agricultural revolution. Not anymore. “Time is accelerating,” Mr. Harari said. “We’re in an unprecedented situation in history in the sense that nobody knows what the basics about how the world will look like in 20 or 30 years. Leaders and political parties are still stuck in the 20th century, in the ideological battles pitting the right against the left, capitalism versus socialism. “Instead of formulating meaningful visions for where humankind will be in 2050, they repackage nostalgic fantasies about the past,” he said. “We’re now living with the collapse of the last story of inevitability,” he said. This now seems extremely naïve, he said.
7 things I do outside work that double my productivity I’d like to confess something. Until recently, I’d get jealous quickly — when I saw someone doing what I wanted to, or ‘living the dream’. (Thank you Instagram.) But I’m not alone, am I? Comparing yourself to someone else is as bad as smoking cigarettes. In this state of mind, I’d resolve to work hard and improve my life. Ladders is now on SmartNews! Download the SmartNews app and add the Ladders channel to read the latest career news and advice wherever you go. However, the jealousy would subside as fast as it arose. Do you feel the same way? Turns out, I was looking at achievers all wrong. What I should truly feel jealous of I felt jealous of achievers’ success. On one side, there were achievers, pushing themselves to do what they had to. But the truth is, achievers didn’t have a better life than mine. How did (do) they find the time to put in the effort to reach where they are? The secret of compounding results Imagine spending your hard-earned money on things you want but don’t need. Okay.
11 Best TED Talks For When You Feel Like You're Burning Out | Time The Psychology of Progressive Hostility Recently, I arrived at a moment of introspection about a curious aspect of my own behavior. When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. I'm a centrist: I hold some conservative views and some liberal views. “That’s a stupid fucking question,” answered a Socialist Alliance activist when I asked sincerely where they were getting what sounded like inflated poverty statistics. When I debate Christians, Jews, Creationists, climate deniers etc. they are unfailingly polite, respectful, thoughtful, discerning, & listen to my arguments. Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ So how and why have these activists become so intolerant and horrible to deal with?
Why most people won’t ever achieve greatness Anyone can achieve greatness. Anyone. Greatness is relative, yes. The results might look different; for some, simply quitting an addiction means greatness. For others, creating a Fortune 500 company means greatness. Anyone can do this. I’m not talking about simple averages and logistics, where “obviously everyone can’t be in the top 5%.” This is because we all have a choice, every moment of every day. This moment is very small, sometimes small enough we don’t believe it’s there. More and more people are hiding behind the excuse that their behaviors, actions, and choices are out of their control. It’s time to unlearn this prison of a belief. Just completely unlearn it. Why Is So Much of the World Mediocre? “Good is the enemy of great. You may wonder: if 100 out of 100 people could achieve greatness, why do so few ever do? It’s not even that they tried and failed, either; most people never even try at all. Why do so few people ever achieve greatness (even when they could)? That’s it.