49 things to do if you're staying home due to Coronavirus
Have you heard of the Dracula Sneeze?
It’s one example of social distancing being recommended these days along with conference cancellations, work from home policies, and school closures.
In many places it’s all adding up to more home time, family time, kid time, and together time.
If you have a break, how do you embrace it?
Today I’m sharing 49 things to do if you’re staying home due to Coronavirus:
49. Build an amazing couch cushion fort
48. Organize the Tupperware drawer
47. Finally scroll through your Camera Roll to pick out a dozen favorites to print for a photo wall
46. Make a lightbulb vase
45. Garden
44. Start a Reading Challenge with your kids (some ideas here)
43. Read The Story of Us at Wait But Why
42. Do a 7-minute workout
41. Finally clean out that basement storage room
40. Make a mix tape or mix tape playlist
39. Order this book and make paper airplanes
38. Listen to 3 Books (start with David Sedaris, Angie Thomas, or Seth Godin)
37. Prune your apps
36. Read all 1000 awesome things
35. Pick names out of a hat and paint that person’s toenails
34. Read the “Little House” series with your kids
33. Learn how to play chess
32. Go down a 92nd Street Y rabbit hole
31. Pick one of “26 very long books worth the time they’ll take to read”
30. Plan an epic board games tournament
29. Make a Maze Book
28. Watch David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech
27. Throw an indoor picnic
26. Go for a walk and wave at everyone from a distance
25. Pick something you know more about than most people and edit the Wikipedia page
24. Pick a year and watch all the Best International Feature Film nominees
23. Pick a country and plan an International Dinner Night with new recipes and music
22. Take Yale’s popular free online course “The Science of Well-Being”
21. Or another free course
20. Pick a blog you love and commit to reading the entire Archive (try this, this, or this)
19. Craft and mail a postcard to PostSecret
18. Write one of those late 90’s-style giant essay updates emails to a friend. Say you don’t need a reply
17. Organize your books in the Dewey Decimal System (use this and this to help)
16. Download Merlin and become a backyard birder (For inspiration, read this.)
15. Watch the most popular TED Talks of 2019
14. Pick one of the (growing) 1000 most formative books to read
13. Put together a care package for a friend or family member
12. Do a yoga class
11. Go on a long nature walk in the woods
10. Pick a room and rearrange all the furniture
9. Start journalling using Two-Minute Mornings or Ahhlife.com
8. Fix something that's been broken forever
7. Build a stack of pancakes that looks just like the front of the box
6. Organize your filing cabinet, hard drive, or recipes
5. Make a bird feeder out of things lying around your house
4. Paint
3. FaceTime Grandma
2. Check in on your neighbors
1. Forward this email to a friend and pick something to do together
3 steps to developing a happier mindset
While researching resilience for You Are Awesome I found that in order to become more resilient, you need to cultivate a positive mindset first. Why? Because the stronger we are mentally, the better we are able to bend -- not break -- when challenges come.
A positive mindset is like Optimism Insurance. It helps soften every blow you get from a nasty email, friend letting you down, or bad news story flying across the headlines.
So how do we develop a happier mindset?
Let me answer in three steps:
Step 1: Flip your happiness model
Our parents lied! They said they wanted us to be happy but then also encouraged us to go to a good school, find a good job, and work hard for a promotion. Sure, everyone’s parents are different but I would argue that most of us hear some version of this model told to us as children:
GREAT WORK → BIG SUCCESS → BE HAPPY
You know, study really hard, get good grades, go be a doctor! (Are my Indian roots showing?) Or simply work really hard, get a promotion, then be happy!
The first step to cultivating a positive mindset is flipping this model.
Based on research I share below, how does developing a happier mindset really work?
BE HAPPY → GREAT WORK → BIG SUCCESS
Yes, it’s the opposite! A phenomenal paper called The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead To Success? shows that if you're happy first... then you do great work, because you're happier doing it! You're 31% more productive, have 37% higher sales, and are three times more creative, amongst a host of other benefits.
So Step 1 is realizing that cultivating a positive mindset needs to happen first … and not as the result of work or success.
Step 2: Commit to a “20 for 20” happiness challenge
So we know we have to be happy first. But… how? Does anyone just wake up in a good mood every day? I don’t! Most people don’t. We have to work at it. It's like yoga. A practice. The goal isn’t to be perfect … the goal is to be better than before.
Luckily there are dozens of positive psychology studies that give specific, tactical practices that we can use to cultivate this mindset.
I often challenge people to commit to a “20 for 20” challenge which means you take one of these practices below and commit to doing it for 20 minutes a day for 20 days in a row. By then you have created a new happiness practice that will be harder to stop.
What are some of the practices? I’ve listed five of my favorites below together with one study on each. Remember: These all take 20 minutes or less a day. And it’s a multiple choice question. You don’t have to do them all! Just pick one.
Journaling about the highlights of your day
In a University of Texas study called “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words,” researchers Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker had one member of a couple write about their relationship for twenty minutes three times a day. Compared to the test group, the couple was more likely to engage in intimate dialogue afterward, and the relationship was more likely to last. What should you write down? Simply a laundry list of the highlights of your day. If you aren't the pen and paper type then try the free email journaling service Ahhlife.com.
Take a nature walk (or another exercise you like)
The American Psychosomatic Society published a study showing how Michael Babyak and a team of researchers found three thirty-minute brisk walks or jogs can improve recovery from clinical depression. Yes, clinical depression. Results were stronger than those from studies using medication or studies using exercise and medication combined. Can you commit to going for a jog 20 days in a row or going for a walk in the woods? If you can get into nature the phytoncides released from trees can reduce adrenaline and cortisol (a stress hormone) in your body. (More on this from the paper "Effect of forest bathing trips on human immune function")
Reading 20 pages of fiction
A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology showed that reading triggers our mirror neurons and opens up the parts of our brain responsible for developing empathy, compassion and understanding. What does EQ help with? Becoming a better leader, teacher, parent and sibling. (Sidenote: This big a-ha on reading is one of the reasons I launched my podcast 3 Books … where I interview folks like David Sedaris, Judy Blume, and Malcolm Gladwell about which 3 books changed their life. Trying to help find that always elusive next great book to read.)
Playing “Rose Rose Thorn Bud” around the dinner table
My family and I play a game called Rose Rose Thorn Bud almost every night. Essentially, we take turns sharing two roses (what we’re grateful for), a thorn (what didn’t go well that day), and a bud (something we’re looking forward to). I wrote a longer article on Rose Rose Thorn Bud here and made a video on it here, too.
Singing
A study published in Evolution & Human Behavior found that choral singing calms the heart, boosts endorphin levels, improves lung function, expands pain thresholds, and decreases reliance on pain medication. Choral singing was even found to elicit feelings of inclusion, connectivity and positivity, and fosters social closeness in a group. Can you join a church choir or develop a sing-a-long playlist to jam with your kids during school dropoff or pickup?
Step 3: Swap negative inputs for positive inputs
Our brains crave bad news.
We have 200,000 years of evolution programmed into our brains that have perfected the art of looking for problems, finding problems, and solving problems. It's why we rubberneck on the highway, it's why if it bleeds it leads, it's why, in the words of author and media critic Ryan Holiday, "MSNBC's real goal is to glue you to a television screen and sell you Subarus." We get addicted to that hit as our amygdala constantly scans the world for problems. No wonder sometimes that's all we see!
So what's Step 3 to developing a happier mindset?
Swap negative inputs for positive inputs. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions, unfollow all news sites on social media, swipe left on your iPhone and scroll down to disable the News Widget that automatically pops up. (Here's a WikiHow article on disabling iPhone News with more detail.). What's the goal? Swap superficial knowledge of "many bad things every single day" for deeper knowledge on the things that matter to you most. How? Through reading books. And, signing up for emails that actually serve and honor your attention instead of mining it for ads. (Here are 10 I personally read and recommend.)
Don't worry. After you ditch the news you'll still know what's going on. It's impossible to avoid all the TV screens blaring in the corner of every elevator, dentist office, or airport lounge. You may know less about what's going on but you'll be consciously trading that in for deeper knowledge, greater wisdom, and, yes, a happier mindset.
What are the three steps to developing a happier mindset?
Step 1: Flip your happiness model
Step 2: Commit to a "20 for 20" happiness challenge
Step 3: Swap negative inputs for positive inputs
Do you think you can do it?
I know you can do it.
Start right now.
And good luck!
3 ways money can buy you happiness
John Lennon was wrong.
Love isn’t all you need.
A famous study in 2010 by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School said making money helps make you happier … up to $75,000 a year. Sure, we can debate the study endlessly. How do they define happiness? How do you define happiness? What if you live in a big expensive city compared to a more affordable small town? What country and currency? And what about in today’s dollars?
But let’s not get lost in the debate.
Can we agree going from struggling to making ends meet to actually making ends meet would make you happier? And that going from making ends meet to having some extra money beyond that would, too?
If so I think the better question really is: How can you spend your money to be happier?
Well, I have just the answer for you! Here are three ways you can spend money to be happier:
1. SKILL
Go online and sign yourself up for painting, ballroom dancing, or figure skating classes. Why? Well, I’m going to be really honest with you. You suck at a lot of things. Your chocolate-making is subpar at best, nobody has seen you mix a decent Manhattan, and your balloon animals are pretty terrible – except, I guess, for your snake.
There’s a lot of research that shows that when we grow, we are happier. Don’t we know this deep down? We all love feeling the burn and reward of learning and then mastering something new. Why are you reading this article? Our minds are always trying to learn. We like it. We crave it.
My friend Michael is a successful author and entrepreneur and last year he told me he signed up for a standup comedy course on a bit of whim. You know what? That’s perfect! Why? Because he had never done standup comedy. He was awful at standup comedy. But he spent the money and felt it would be wasted if he didn’t go. So he went! And by the end? He had put together a tight five-minute set which he happily emailed around to his friends.
Money well spent.
2. SOCIAL
I’ve shared before how my wife Leslie and I each have one “night out” a week. I have a Neil’s Night Out. She has a Leslie’s Night Out.
What do we do?
Well, I’ll get dinner with an old friend, go to a play with my mom, or maybe go to a bookstore to hear an author talk about her new book. Even if it’s with a roomful of people I don’t necessarily know I come home with the feeling of growing and deepening relationships.
Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert wrote the book Stumbling on Happiness. He says if we strip ourselves of everything we think defines us — our genders, nationalities, religions, even our health — it’s really the strength of our relationships with our friends and family that truly affects our happiness levels.
Is there a couple you and your partner have been meaning to invite out for a dinner? A brother- or sister-in-law you can go on a random movie night with? Are you willing to go on Meetup.com and take part in a random social event with a group of strangers? Or pay to join a local Toastmasters Club?
All of them will make you happier.
3. SWEAT
Sweat once a day.
I suck at softball but that didn’t stop me from joining a softball league with some friends a few years ago. Yes, I have been demoted to right field after letting every ground ball go through my legs. But it means once a week at least I’m guaranteed to run around. Joining the team cost $125. And it pays off in spades.
The American Psychosomatic Society published a study showing how Michael Babyak and a team of doctors found that three 30-minute brisk walks or jogs can improve recovery from clinical depression. That’s right, clinical depression. And the results were actually stronger than studies using medication or studies using exercise and medication combined.
Sweating is a science-backed prescription for happiness. Grab a yoga membership. Sign up for kick-boxing. Join a dodgeball league. Or just buy some nice running shoes and start running around the block.
Does money buy happiness?
Well, it can.
Just remember the 3 S’s.
Buy a skill, invest in social nights, and sweat it out.
Fancy cars, sexy threads, and flashy purses can wait.
What we all need are your balloon animals.
Check out the video version of this article
The secret tool everyone can use to develop self-confidence
We know we shouldn’t listen to our critics. We know we should do things for ourselves. Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the Japanese martial art aikido, said, “As soon as you concern yourself with the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weaken and defeat you.”
So why do we listen? What makes us interested in external measurements? Why do we take outside rankings, results, or opinions over our own opinion of ourselves?
There is a root issue. An underlying reason. There is one issue that many of us have, that I know I have, that is at the basis of why we jump at external rankings. The root issue is . . . our lack of confidence. Self-judgment. We get lost in our own heads, we get confused with mixed advice, so we follow what we see. The root issue is self-confidence. And we’re going to solve this root issue together right now.
“Every single day I come to work I feel like I’m a failure.”
Twilight shone through the glass window and dim lights lit up leather chairs and the shiny lacquered desk as I sat staring in disbelief at my Harvard Business School leadership professor as he smiled wryly through wet, shiny eyes.
Tenured Harvard Business School professors have bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and PhDs, and they finish at the top of their class in all three! They make six-figure salaries and consult and speak on the side to earn even more. And they’re teaching at Harvard! A not-too-shabby résumé bullet point.
So why did my Harvard professor consider himself a failure?
“I walk up to my office door every morning and see that the professor in the office to my left has a Nobel Prize . . . and I know I’ll never have a Nobel Prize,” he continued. “And I see that the professor in the office to my right has written twelve books . . . and I know I’ll never write twelve books. I haven’t even written one. Every single morning I’m reminded how inferior I am and it kills me.”
I looked at him and could tell he was smiling and trying to make a point . . . but I could also see there was some truth in his words. After all, in his world, all his major accomplishments are neutralized by his peers. Piles of degrees, million-dollar bank ac- counts, prestigious jobs—all just par for the course.
The secret scribble to increasing your confidence
What is confidence and how can we become more confident?
Time for the confidence scribble.
Let’s talk about your opinion of yourself. It can be high or low. Sure, it will flip-flop all the time. But let’s say in any instant it can be high or it can be low. Does confidence just have to do with your opinion of yourself?
No!
Most people think it does. But we always have an opinion of others, too. What do you call people with a high opinion of themselves and a low opinion of others? They’re not confident. They are . . .
Stuck-up. Egotistical. Bigheaded. Arrogant people are not confident because they don’t understand that having a high opinion of others doesn’t lower their opinion of themselves. They are affected by other people’s confidence! It makes them feel weak. So they try to lower that confidence while increasing their own. Remember the school yard bully who actually feels bad about himself deep down? This is the guy we’re talking about here. This is the guy who feels the need to be better than others in order to be good at all.
Next box. What do you call people with a high opinion of others but a low opinion of themselves?
We’ve all been there! We think greatly of other people and believe ourselves to be “lesser than.” You feel this way when you stare at a group photo and say something like “Oh my God! I look hideous! I look huge! You look great, though.” Talk about beating yourself up. High opinion of others. Low opinion of yourself. Insecure.
Now, what do you call people with a low opinion of themselves and a low opinion of others? No high opinions of anyone at all!
We’ve all been here, too. Bad days, bad bosses, big mistakes. We can get into a funk and see problems everywhere. We become cynical. The cynic isn’t confident. Cynical is the furthest thing from confident! As Conan O’Brien said on his final episode hosting The Tonight Show, “All I ask of you is one thing: Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism—it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
What’s left? What do the truly confident people have? They have a high opinion of themselves. And! They have a high opinion of others. That is the true definition of confidence.
The secret tool to increasing your confidence is the confidence scribble. We will all float around these boxes over and over but the key is taking a second to pause, stand back, and ask yourself where you are right now... and how you can help your mind navigate to the top right box.
Buddha says, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
Check out the video version of this article
A slightly different version of this article is excerpted from The Happiness Equation
Why you can’t fully live until you’ve accepted death
How do you deal with knowing that one day you’ll die?
I’ve been getting asked this question more and more lately.
It’s why I read so many books on death. It’s why I write so much about The Deathbed Test.
So, how do I deal with knowing that one day I’ll die?
I embrace it.
Fully. 100%.
Embracing death, and living an intentional life as a corollary, I’ve actually realized is the underpinning of all my thinking, all my books, my TED Talk, and just how I try (try) to show up every single day as a son, brother, husband, father, writer, speaker, and fellow human being.
My whole thing is about intentional living.
Because here’s how I think about it:
One day I will die. One day you will die. One day our grandparents will die and our parents will die and our kids will die and their kids will die and their kids will die and their kids will die. The guy cutting you off in traffic? He’ll die. The lady calling you at dinner selling you a credit card? She’ll die. The cashier at the corner store? Dead. Every teacher you’ve ever had, everyone who’s ever woken up beside you, every actor in every movie, every politician in every country… will all be dead. In the blink of an eye.
The average lifespan is 30,000 days.
That time is always, always ticking.
And you will never be as young as you are right now.
So what does that mean?
Well, you have two choices.
You can either be horribly depressed by this thought.
You can feel as though nothing really matters since we are all ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the end. The game is already over! What’s the point? Of this? Of anything? Who cares? Why try? Or, if you do care or do try, maybe it’s because you feel like this weird life on Earth thing is some kind of ‘waiting room’ or ‘test’ towards a higher ideal or better place where we live for infinity after this life is done.
Or:
You can be incredibly liberated by this thought.
We are all going to die! So? This really matters. This! Right here. It really matters. Today really matters. The voicemail you leave for your mom? It really matters. The note you put in your kids lunch? It really matters. Putting your phone away to really connect with your family over dinner? It really matters. The smile you share with a neighbor? It really matters. The art you’re making? The risk you’re taking? The cake you’re baking?
It really matters.
It really matters.
It really matters.
All of it.
It does.
Because there’s not much time.
So in this limited time we have here, in the limited minds we have here, all swimming somewhere inside this vast expanding universe — which, reminder!, we really have no idea what it even is and how it got here and why we got here — our only job, duty, and goal is to live every single day like it is so precious and beautiful and special and rare and fleeting and finite …
… because it is.
And because this matters.
It really matters.
The choice of being horribly depressed or incredibly liberated is up to you.
An earlier version of this article appeared on Apple News
7 ways to read (a lot) more books this year
How many books do you read a year?
For most of my adult life I read maybe five books a year — if I was lucky. I called myself a reader! I told people I was a reader! But in reality I’d just read a couple on vacation and have a few slow burners sitting on the bedside table for months.
But then a few years ago I surprised myself by suddenly reading 50 books. And last year I read well over 100. I have never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life. I feel more interesting, I feel like a better husband, I feel like a better father, and my writing output has dramatically increased.
Amplifying my reading rate has been the lead domino that’s tipped over a slew of others.
I’m disappointed I didn’t do it sooner.
Why did I wait 20 years?
Well, our world today is designed for shallow skimming rather than deep diving, so it took me some time to identify the specific changes that skyrocketed my reading rate. So how did I 10x my reading rate? Well, I did seven specific things that I think you can do, too.
Here they are:
1. Centralize reading in your home
Back in 1998, psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues performed their famous “chocolate chip cookie and radish” experiment. They split test subjects into three groups and asked them not to eat anything for three hours before the experiment. Group 1 was given chocolate chip cookies and radishes, and were told they could eat only the radishes. Group 2 was given chocolate chip cookies and radishes, and were told they could eat anything they liked. Group 3 was given no food at all. Afterward, the researchers had all three groups attempt to solve an impossible puzzle, to see how long they would last. It’s not surprising that group 1, those who had spent all their willpower staying away from the cookies, caved the soonest.
What does this have to do with reading? I think of having a TV in your main living area as a plate of chocolate chip cookies. So many delicious TV shows tempt us, reducing our willpower to tackle the books.
Roald Dahl’s poem “Television” says it all: “So please, oh please, we beg, we pray / go throw your TV set away / and in its place, you can install / a lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
The first step to reading more is moving your TV to the basement. My wife Leslie and I did this and then installed a bookshelf on a wall near our front door. Now we see it, walk by it, and touch the bookshelf dozens of times a day. And the TV sits dormant unless the Raptors are in the playoffs.
2. Make a public commitment
In his groundbreaking book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini shares a psychology study showing that once people place their bets at the racetrack, they are much more confident about their horse’s chances than they were just before laying down the bet. He goes on to explain how commitment is one of the big six weapons of social influence. So why can’t we think of ourselves as the racehorses? Make the bet on reading by opening an account at Goodreads, friending a few coworkers or friends, and then updating your profile every time you read a book. Or put together an email list to send out short reviews of the books you read. I do exactly that each month, with my Monthly Book Club Email. I stole the idea from bestselling author Ryan Holiday, who has a great reading list.
3. Find a few trusted, curated lists
Related to the above, the publishing industry puts out over 500,000 books a year in english alone. Do you have time to sift through 1000 new books a week? No, nobody does, so we use proxies like Amazon recommendations. But should we get our reading lists from retailers? If you’re like me, and you love the “staff picks” wall in independent bookstores, there’s nothing as nice as getting one person’s favorite books. Finding a few trusted, curated lists can be as simple as the email lists I mentioned, but with a bit of digging you can likely find the one that totally aligns with your tastes. Some good lists are from Bill Gates, Reese Witherspoon, Andrew Luck, and Derek Sivers.
4. Change your mindset about quitting
It’s one thing to quit reading a book and feel bad about it. It’s another to quit a book and feel proud of it. All you have to do is change your mindset. Just say, “Phew! Now I’ve finally ditched this brick to make room for that gem I’m about to read next.” An article that can help enable this mindset is “The Tail End,” by Tim Urban, which paints a striking picture of how many books you have left to read in your lifetime. Once you fully digest that number, you’ll want to hack the vines away to reveal the oases ahead.
I quit three or four books for every book I read to the end. I do the “first five pages test” before I buy any book (checking for tone, pace, and language) and then let myself off the hook if I need to stop halfway through.
5. Take a “news fast” and channel your reading dollars
I subscribed to the New York Times and five magazines for years. I rotated subscriptions to keep them fresh, and always loved getting a crisp new issue in the mail. After returning from a long vacation where I finally had some time to lose myself in books, I started realizing that this shorter, choppier nature of reading was preventing me from going deeper. So I canceled all my subscriptions.
Besides freeing up mindshare, what does canceling all news inputs do? For me, it saved more than $500 per year. That can pay for about 50 books per year. What would I rather have 10 or 20 years later — a prized book collection which I’ve read and learned from over the years…or a pile of old newspapers? And let’s not forget your local library. If you download Library Extension for your browser, you can see what books and e-books are available for free right around the corner.
6. Triple your churn rate
I realized that for years I’d thought of my bookshelf as a fixed and somewhat artistic object: There it is, sitting by the flower vases! Now I think of it as a dynamic organism. Always moving. Always changing. In a given week I probably add about five books to the shelf and get rid of three or four. Books come in through lending libraries in our neighborhood, a fantastic used bookstore, local indie and chain stores, and, of course, online outlets. Books go out when we pass them to friends, sell them to the used bookstore, or drop them off at the lending library. This dynamism means I’m always walking over to the shelf, never just walking by it. As a result, I read more.
7. Reapply the 10,000 steps rule
A good friend once told me a story that really stuck with me. He said Stephen King had told people to read something like five hours a day. My friend said, “That’s ridiculous. Who can do that?” But then, years later, he found himself in Maine on vacation. He was waiting in line outside a movie theater with his girlfriend, and guess who was waiting in front of him? Stephen King! His nose was in a book the whole time in line. When they got into the theater, Stephen King was still reading as the lights dimmed. When the lights came up, he pulled his book open right away. He even read as he was leaving. Now, I haven’t personally confirmed this story with The King himself but I think the message is an important one either way. Basically, you can read a lot more. There are minutes hidden in all the corners of the day, and they add up to a lot of minutes. In a way, it’s like the 10,000 steps rule. Walk around the grocery store, park at the back of the lot, chase your kids around the house, and bam — 10,000 steps.
It’s the same with reading.
When did I read those five books a year for most of my life? On holidays or during long flights. “Oh! A lot of downtime coming,” I’d think. “Better grab a few books.”
When do I read now? All the time. A few pages here. A few pages there. I have a book in my bag at all times. In general I read nonfiction in the mornings, when my mind is in active learning mode, and fiction at night before bed, when my mind needs an escape.
Slipping pages into all the cricks and corners of the day adds up.
So let me ask you some blunt questions: Are you really ready to 10x your reading rate? Are you prepared to make sacrificial lambs of your TV and newspapers? Are you ready to quit more to read more? Are you ready to publicly commit to the world?
I hope so and I hope some of these steps help.
Happy reading.
21 Awesome Things About The Holidays
Deck the halls with boughs of awesome.
Here are twenty-one awesome things about the holidays. Let's get into it:
Plugging in the Christmas lights from last year and having them all work
Nope, not even a year twisted into a ball of knots in the basement could take the sparkle out of these bright little bulbs. So untie them slowly, hang them quickly, and help get the whole neighborhood shining.
AWESOME!
When the neighbor shovels that little patch of the sidewalk
Sidewalks bring us together.
Fences split yards, lawns divide homes, and invisible property lines are scribbled on dusty blueprints in city archives. But somehow those little strips of concrete tie us all together and connect the dots between our lives.
It’s a beautiful moment when a friendly neighbor shovels the snow off of your walk after a winter snowstorm. Swaddled in snow-packed mitts, sweaty scarves, and salty boots, they’re just lending a helping hand of kindness and some friendly season’s greetings.
AWESOME!
When construction cranes get Christmas lights on them
They’re not selling anything.
Nope, Christmas lights on construction cranes just smile down on the city and cover us all in a warm and festive light. Flickering in the sky, flashing way up high, they hug us all together in a friendly yellow glow.
On top of that, it’s sort of fun thinking about how they got there too. Doesn’t it seem kind of dangerous? It’s like someone risked their lives just putting up lights for the people.
Thanks Spiderman!
AWESOME!
The Holiday Party Save
Do we need all those parties?
Sure, we all love catching up with close friends in Christmas sweaters, but sometimes the office party feels like a meeting with veggie trays, and clinking drinks with second cousins gets old. Face it—there are times when you need to be saved, my friends. Yes, the Holiday Party Save happens anytime a friend yanks you from a bad holiday party conversation by pulling off a thrilling and daring rescue mission.
Here’s how it all goes down:
Step 1: The Plan. Say tonight you’re heading to your uncle’s annual Christmas party with your new boyfriend. As you both walk into Stranger Conversation Territory, it’s important to make that deal up front: You save them, they save you. Don’t forget to shake.
Step 2: The Signal. You’re trapped! When you find yourself listening to neverending vacation stories, getting detailed stock-picking advice, or hearing about someone’s thesis, it’s time to get out. Signal your friend with an eager Smile ’n’ Raised Eyebrows glance, casual Nodding Head-Tilt beckon, or if absolutely necessary, a booming bloodcurdling “Get over here!” scream, like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat.
Step 3: The Save. Here’s the tricky part. Your friend comes over and has two options. First, they can play False Emergency and drag you away while apologizing to the chatty strangers. This is risky because it could look forced and you’ll need to disappear rather than just talk to someone else. Instead, they can try The Natural, which is where they drop a nice, normal transition into the conversation. “Should we go grab some food?” “Linda just got here, let’s say hi,” or “Where’s the bathroom?” usually work well.
Remember: When you’re stuck, when you’re stranded, when all you see is gloom, just yell for your brothers and sisters and let them pull you across the room.
AWESOME!
When that kid crying at the mall isn’t your kid
There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned holiday hissy fit in an elbow-to-elbow packed mall to help soothe your fraying nerves.
Whether it’s the snotty-nosed toddler wailing on Santa’s lap, the sweaty snowsuit screamer on the floor of the toys section, or your everyday baby bawler yelling to the food court heavens, it doesn’t matter.
It’s just a migraine moment in the middle of mall mayhem.
And whether you’re taking care of your baby brother, babysitting the neighbors, or wheeling around your own mutant offspring, we’ve all been there. We all know the stress, we see the staring eyes, we all know the pain, and . . . we do sympathize.
But it’s still great when that kid crying in the mall just isn’t your kid.
Hark! The herald angels sing.
Glory to the kid free king.
AWESOME!
Pulling out that old box of Christmas ornaments from when you were a kid
Let’s go back.
Crack open that musty cardboard box from the basement storage space and get ready to brainwarp back to the big eyes and bright lights of your youth. Yes, yank out that twisted clump of yarn, ceramics, and construction paper and get ready for a sweet stroll down memory lane. Hopefully your old box features some of these classics:
1. A chipped ceramic you painted in elementary school. Maybe it’s the shiny Santa Claus that you doused in too much lacquer back in third grade. The brush strokes make his beard look gray, and one of his eyeballs has a blue smear that makes him cross-eyed. But his smile still holds and that little ribbon you knotted through his hat is perfect for hanging him back up on the tree.
2. Homemade ornaments featuring some combination of construction paper, popcorn, and glitter. When you were young you cleared off the kitchen table and set up a home workshop where you stitched popcorn, glued sparkles, and taped up little rolls of construction paper. And even though the reds have faded to orange and the glitter has cracked away, there’s something beautiful about pulling out those squashed rings, baby handprints, or crayon drawings and letting your brain slip back to simpler days.
3. The hundred-year-old hand-me-down. You’re lucky if you have one of these wood-carved gems bouncing around the bottom of the box. Someone’s Great-grandpa whittled a toy train engine or rosy-cheeked soldier from some softwood and delicately painted it to perfection. Maybe the tree it’s carved from is two or three hundred years old and fell from the woods of a distant forest. High fives if you agree this beats the neon plastic from the dollar store any day.
Yes, when you pull out that box of Christmas ornaments from when you were a kid, it’s like taking a magical mystery tour back to your childhood. It’s a brief headtrip out of your serious grown-up body into the Freaky Friday fun times of yesterday.
AWESOME!
When strangers wish you happy holidays
Holidays are stressful. Gift shopping, mall hopping, money dropping, and through it all you’re planning in-law sleepovers, giant family dinners, and complicated travel plans.
It’s nice in these roaring revved-up moments when a complete stranger catches your eye and wishes you a heartfelt happy holidays.
Whether it’s the cashier at the grocery store, the receptionist at your gym, or the lady getting a perm beside you at the salon, it’s nice scoring that warm little season’s greetings to remind us we’re all chasing the same ol’ thing.
That’s right: Love, big hugs, family time, and cozy company right when we need it most.
AWESOME!
That moment near the holidays when there’s suddenly cookies, chocolate, and candy everywhere
Let’s get fat together.
Roll those rum balls, sprinkle sparkles on the shortbread, and dump the bulk bag of candy canes in the crystal dish by the secretary’s desk.
AWESOME!
Flipping channels and stumbling on that one Christmas special you loved as a kid
It’s a wonderful life.
When you’re bunkering in the basement to get away from the holiday madness upstairs, it’s always nice when the channel flipping pops you onto your favorite old flashback.
Which classic gem burrows into your heart?
1. That Rudolph stop-motion special. Sam the Snowman (no relation to Frosty) narrates this epic tale of outcasts Rudolph and Hermey the Elf as they stumble through the North Pole meeting Yukon Cornelius and the Abominable Snowman before taking refuge on the Island of Misfit Toys. Never forget the moral of the story: Follow your heart and become a dentist.
2. A Charlie Brown Christmas. Like most Charlie Brown cartoons, this one features monotone voices, confusing plots, and dry humor. Thankfully, jazzy piano music and dancing kids make it all come together.
3. Any non-Christmas movie that takes place during Christmas. Sure, Bruce Willis crawling around office ducts in Die Hard might not seem festive, but listen closely to the background music and you’ll hear some Christmas tunes. Let’s throw in Lethal Weapon, Gremlins, and Batman Returns, too.
4. How The Grinch Stole Christmas. All the Whos living in Whoville have a serious problem in that there’s a freakish monster living in the cliffs above their romantic mountain town — dramatically reducing property values by the day. If you don’t love the big rhyming sing-a-long finish to this one, your heart is officially three sizes too small.
5. Frosty the Snowman. Poor Frosty just doesn’t have the personality of Sam from the Rudolph special. And since they always air this one with Rudolph, the inferiority of Frosty jumps out even more. Honestly, if Frosty is your favorite old Christmas special, then I feel sorry for you. You had a rough childhood.
6. Whatever special is on the same time as Frosty on the other channel. A Garfield Christmas, John Denver and the Muppets, or Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas automatically win.
Finding your favorite holiday special from when you were a kid is like uncovering a hidden stash of buried treasure at the bottom of the sea. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen it a hundred times, have it on your computer, or own the DVD, either. There’s just something sweet about feeling like it was waiting there at this very moment … and feeling like the stars all aligned to give you a brief little dose of
AWESOME!
The Super Present Power Shop
You’re running late.
When it’s almost Christmas and there’s nothing under the tree it’s time to furrow your brows, steady your glare, and clench those fists for a big Super Present Power Shop.
Yes, this is where you bust into the mall in a sweatshirt-and-running shoes tornado and spin around at high speeds until successfully finding something for everyone on your list.
Black Friday’s long gone, online delivery windows are closed, and now it’s crunch time. Here are some tips to pulling it off:
Good parkin’ is good startin’. Circling the frozen tundra in lot WW is a fool’s game. No, you need to find the secret YMCA entrance, get a drop off and pick up, or arrive ten minutes before doors open to score a front spot. Don’t forget The PLPT.
Skip the coat, grab the kicks. Leave your winter jacket in the trunk and sprint across the icy lot to the front door because thirty seconds of frozen lungs is worth avoiding three hours of overheating. Plus, those running shoes will help you run and dive for the last Baby Farts-A-Lot in the toy store.
Plug in. Stuff some headphones in your ears and rock out to 2Unlimited or Technotronic to stay motivated. Remember: Nothing slows you down more than hearing Santa Baby for the third time in an hour so pump up the jam and let’s move this.
Couples for couples. If you have couples on your list just divide the number of gifts by two. Beer mug for him, wine glasses for her? No, martini shaker for both. You get the idea.
Close your list, open your mind. Focus is important so jot down your names and ideas before hitting the stores. Just make sure to leave your mind open for things to jump off the shelves. Breath mints, People magazines, and IKEA golf pencils all make lovely stocking stuffers.
Bag a Monster. It’s important to ask the first store you visit for the largest bags they have. They should go fishing for a couple minutes and pull out the king-sized ones normally reserved for toaster ovens and dehumidifiers. Use those monster to eat everything else you buy all day.
Okay, listen, listen — these are just a few tips to get you going. As you start perfecting your Power Shop you’ll grow more advanced techniques like stuffing your pockets with peanut butter sandwiches, phoning for inventory checks while waiting in lines, and buying someone a sled so you can drag all your presents from shop to shop.
But no matter what kind of Power Shop you pull off, one thing’s for sure: when you crash back into your couch surrounded by full bags and a crossed-off list well… it’s time to unclench your muscles, droop your eyes, and just smile back slowly at your mall-conquering moment of
AWESOME!
Putting a Santa hat on your pet or grandparent
It’s party time.
And those Christmas sweaters are just the beginning.
I mean sure, tossing on a thick woolly for the holiday party is a sure way to spread the cheer — especially if your sweater features hypnotic swirls of red and green, a giant floating snowman head, or an intense action sequence of Santa flying his reindeer through a blizzard.
But to really get that party going and that eggnog flowing you’ve got to crank it up a notch. Yes, we’re talking about tossing a Santa cap on your golden retriever or grandpa, we’re talking about tossing one on your labradoodle or grandma, and we’re talking about everyone donning their gay apparel to whip this holiday bash into a whole new level of
AWESOME!
Snow falling on Christmas eve
Jumbo snowflakes falling thick and heavy on Christmas Eve is a special sight. They blur the world for a moment and lay a fresh blank canvas over everything. So if you’re sitting inside listening to carols on the radio, munching Christmas cookies, or chatting with family and friends, take a moment to look out the window and just enjoy the scene.
AWESOME!
Ripping your present open like a wild animal
First, some apologies.
We’re sorry, Endurance Wrapper. You spent thirty minutes getting the present just right with your scissor-frilled ribbons, crisply folded corners, and those adorable little bows. You put time in and we didn’t respect that with our raccoon-with-rabies slaughtering of your gift.
We’re sorry, Auntie Paper Collector. We know you quietly keep all the discarded bows and paper to fold back into little piles for next year. Nobody minds the creased sun-faded reindeer wrapping paper because we know you’re saving money and the planet. But this time we didn’t leave you with much. Unless you’re collecting saliva-smeared scraps, squashed boxes, and torn bows.
We’re sorry, Garbage Collecting Dad. We see you trudging around the living room with the World’s Lightest Garbage Bag, scooping up all the tiny bits of tissue paper and sticky ripped price tags. We know your job would be a lot easier if all presents moved to a Gift Bag Only Policy.
We are very, very sorry to you all.
And now that we’ve apologized our conscience is clear.
Because the truth is we love ripping presents open like a drugged-up reindeer.
AWESOME!
Trying on your new clothes as soon as you unwrap them
Stiff creases, unhemmed pants, and itchy tags can’t dent your mood.
Now it’s time to change real fast, clear the kitchen runway, and strut your stuff in a private fashion show for your friends and family.
And dog.
AWESOME!
The In-law Nap
The In-law Nap is any nap you manage to pull off at the in-law’s house. As long as it’s not during Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas present unwrapping, or while the birthday cake is served, it is a completely legal nap and fully counts as spending quality time visiting the in-laws.
Whether you skip out on setting the table, ditch helping with the dishes, or just miss a couple hours playing cards with Grandma . . . it doesn’t matter.
All that matters is you pulled it off.
Yes, you answered a phony phone call in the other room for twenty minutes, you snuck into the kid’s fort and fell asleep in the cushion barracks, or you hid on a pile of jackets and scraggly blankets in the spare bedroom.
All that matters is you pulled it off.
All that matters is that you’re
AWESOME!
Drinking with Grandma
It’s time for some intergenerational egg nogging.
Get ready to light the yule log, sail the gravy boat, and get your eighty-five pound grandmother a sloshy glass of rummy nog.
Now, whatever your age, whatever your tastes, whatever your pleasures, whatever your fates, let’s all agree on one thing today: grabbing an occasional festive drink with your mom’s mom or your son’s son bridges boundaries and crosses divides.
Once upon your time your grandma used to boogie. Once upon a time your grandma threw it down. I’m saying before you danced on tables, she danced on them, too. And before you learned to mix things, she was mixing two.
So when the holidays hit and the families combine it’s time to bring out the punch bowl and time to have a good time. Because we’re not here forever and we’re not here very long. We don’t get many chances so toss one back before granny’s gone.
I never knew my grandparents but I heard stories they were great… so I know if they were here now we’d party hard before it got too late.
AWESOME!
When your guests do the dishes even after you told them not to
It’s time for Christmas dinner.
Yes, sweaty and flushed, you run around baking bread and breaking eggs before that doorbell bing-bongs, the guests ping-pong, and everyone sits down to eat up your delicious holiday meal.
Of course, you enjoy the dinner—you love it, it’s great—but you don’t really enjoy it. No, you’re running around refilling glasses, folding napkins, scooping seconds, warming pies. You’re cleaning crumbs, wiping babies, and keeping an eye on The Kids Table. While everyone sits and chats, you’re a Tasmanian devil of dining room insanity, whipping into a whirlwind and making sure everyone enjoys their meal.
By the end, you’re completely and utterly exhausted. Your bones are bleeding, your skin is stinging, and your body is aching for a tender hug from a cushy couch.
That’s why it’s great when your guests offer to do the dishes after the meal.
“No, no, no,” you say. “Sit down, sit down, sit down.”
But they insist, but you insist, but they insist, but you insist, but they insist . . . and then finally you just stare back at them with hollow, broken eyes and give up.
Now you crashland on the couch, listening to carols as your guests fill the sink and bubble up the suds. And what a beautiful moment of sweet relief it is when you walk back in there and see everything sparklingly clean.
Plus, for the rest of the week you get to enjoy the Treasure Hunt that comes with finding your own dishes in all the wrong cupboards. But it’s no big deal, so just smile and enjoy those Gravy Boat Rescue Missions and Wooden Spoon Search Parties with a smile.
Yes, this one goes out to guests who wash the dishes even after we told them not to. Today we say thanks for the love, thanks for the memories, and thanks for scrubbing the crusty stuffing dish.
AWESOME!
When the Christmas tree gives the only light in the room
Turn out the lights.
Pull the curtains open and watch as jumbo snowflakes drift past the window, snow-covered kids walk by dragging sleds, and winter winds whisper through the evergreens. Smell the turkey crisping in the oven, listen to scratchy carols spinning in your head, and hear footsteps from the family slowly come together in front of the sparkling tree…
Swipe your daughter’s bangs as she lies in your lap, smile at grandpa sipping eggnog on the ottoman, or cuddle up with your cousins in a pile of cozy blankets and comfy sweats on the couch.
Sip that crystal glass of eggnog, sniff the pine of the tree, and relax and share a quiet moment of bliss with someone touching your hands … or your heart.
AWESOME!
Successfully regifting a present to someone who wants it
What do cellophane-wrapped mugs of mini candy canes, Season 3 of Mr. Belvedere on DVD, and framed photos of someone else’s dog have in common?
They’re just what we never wanted.
But that’s okay, that’s okay—because someone else might! Yes, now it’s time for some Regifting Magic, people. It’s time to regift like you’ve never regifted before. You’re a regifting machine if you follow these three steps to freedom:
1. Smile sweetly. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, look them in the eyes while saying thank you over and over. You may also find it helpful to practice these lines (for these items): “I’ve been meaning to try that place!” (gift card to Taco Bell), “How did you know I liked this shade of green?!” (puke green sweater), and “It’s perfect, it’s perfect—honestly, how have I even been wearing shoes all these years?!” (shoehorn).
2. Add it to your gifts-to-give pile. When you get home, make sure to write a thank-you card promptly and then toss the gift in the closet with your motorized self-twirling spaghetti fork, Streetlamps of the World page-a-day calendar, and novelty light-up ceramic angel. Let your inventory bulk up a bit so you’ve got good regift variety, and be sure to hide the stash from future regiftees. Post-it Notes with the name of the person who gave it to you can also help prevent the dreaded Boomerang Gift. Don’t let it happen to you.
3. Annnnnnd . . . regift! Remember that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. When you look at it this way, it feels like you’re doing very important gift-giving charity work. You’re a misfit present coordinator! Now, you need to be about 90 percent sure the regiftee will love the present. After all, there’s nothing wrong with gift cards to Taco Bell and light-up ceramic angels. It’s just that one goes to your backward-cap skateboarding rascal of a little cousin and the other goes to your Grandma who loves tacos.
AWESOME!
Driving around town to see all the Christmas lights
Every city has a street.
It’s the quiet cul-de-sac where all the neighbors play it big for Christmas and decorate their homes with the greatest light show the world has ever seen. Word gets out through the local paper or radio station and soon everyone knows it’s just the place to go for a late night cruise down Neon Light Lane.
It’s the one place everyone enjoys traffic jams.
Sitting bumper to bumper around the quiet crescent, you push your hat above your forehead, press your mittens to the window, and stare out at the twinkling scene. Reds and greens flicker and flash on your darkened face as snow reflects classy floodlights, roofs beam with strings of white, and inflatable Santas bob and wave from the middle of lawns.
And there’s always one house that is just a bit better than the rest. It’s probably the family that got the parade route started with the big splash every year. I like thinking the neighbors leaned on their shovels with furrowed brows when they first saw lights spelling Merry Christmas being draped across the roof, but over time their Grinchlike hearts melted and they felt the Christmas spirit themselves.
Somehow over time the street grew and grew and grew until it became the sparkly beauty we see today. There’s something fun and something sweet about bundling up and just driving down the street. Hear the carols softly on the radio, feel the smiles in the car, and just take a moment to relax and remember how lucky we are.
AWESOME!
The sound of snow crunching under your boots
Dim streetlights cast blurry shadows for your cold walk home.
Snow-packed mitts, floppy wool hat, and a drippy, sniffly nose cover your shuddery frame as you shuffle down empty side streets on your way to the cozy warmth of your waiting bed. Everything is an eerily pitch-perfect silence buried under a shadowy sheet of bright white. Pine trees sway softly, Christmas lights flicker, and the biting air ice-scrapes your frost-nipped nose.
Somehow the solid crunch of your winter boots against the packed road snow fills the night with a relaxing and familiar sound that marks tiny little progress towards cuddling up under warm blankets and falling deep asleep.
Like cracking frozen puddles, pushing soft drink lid buttons, or popping a spoon in a jar of peanut butter, the sound of snow crunching under your salty winter boots scratches a primal itch that just feels so satisfying.
So stuff your hands in your pockets, curl your head to your chest, and crunch loud and crunch proud deep into the dark, winter night.
AWESOME!
Earlier versions of some of these appeared in 1000 Awesome Things and The Book of (Holiday) Awesome
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Feeling anxious about the holidays? Check out this video on how to deal with social anxiety at family gatherings during the holidays:
The Very Best Books I Read In 2019
Welcome to my third annual list of “The Very Best Books I Read This Year.” (Here are my 2017 and 2018 lists.)
Now, books make great gifts but if you want some other intentional living gift ideas check out my Unconventional Christmas Gift Guide.
These are my favorite books I read this year. I hope you find one or two you like.
Happy holidays,
Neil
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19. The Common Good by Robert B. Reich. Think of a beautifully safe small town where nobody locks their doors. Now imagine the first person who comes through breaking and entering. Pretty easy pickings! Nobody locks their doors. Trust plummets. Arms race erupts. Locks. Security systems. Video cameras. This type of trust evaporation and arms racing has happened everywhere and Robert Reich gives an incredibly lucid portrait of exactly what happened when to get us where we are now. I call it trust, he calls it the common good, but either way, this is a vital read to help understand the world we live in. (Sidenote: One of my highlights of 2019 was giving a SXSW talk with Frank Warren called “Building Trust In Distrustful Times”. I used this book to develop some ideas in that talk.)
18. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I read this book as a child… and stopped. I didn’t like it. I read this book as a teen… and stopped. I didn’t like it. I read this book this year… and couldn’t stop. I loved it. Proof a book has to catch you at the right time. My whole life I thought Alice was a children’s book and … it’s not! The twisted references, complex mind games, and crazy absurdism are deliciously adult but baked into simplistic prose. But just because something looks like vanilla pudding doesn’t mean it’s not crème brûlée, you know what I mean? There is so much layered complexity here. Did you know Lewis Carroll was an Oxford-educated mathematician? Just read this section on Wikipedia about the style, themes, and allusions in this book. A hundred pages of bliss. Hope it catches you at the right time.
17. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. A picture-perfect family in Shaker Heights, Ohio is slowly peeled back to reveal all sorts of spaghetti-noodle machinations on the inside. You will feel love, you will feel pain, and (best of all) you feel yourself rubbing against bigger ethical questions that will make you wonder “What would I do in that situation?” A book that will bubble in your blood. (PS. Get it before they ruin the cover ... set to debut as a mini-series starring Reese Witherspoon in 2020!)
16. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Like Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, this is an autobiographical scenescape book. It tells the story of a young black girl growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and serves as a deeply immersive vitamin for growing empathy. Characters pop, dialogue crackles, and it reads like an action movie with the constant acceleration to the finish. I finished it in the middle of the night and then let out a huge deep breath. (Sidenote: This is one of The Hate U Give author Angie Thomas’s three most formative books.)
15. Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale. This book felt like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Two loudmouth, straight-talking friends down in the Texas countryside get sucked into a bumbling plot to find some lost money and everything goes horribly wrong. Fast-paced action, snappy dialogue, and a constantly swerving plot. You’ll feel dizzy and satisfied at the end. And like a Quentin Tarantino movie, it’s definitely Rated R. A great book to escape into another world.
14. Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear. A fragile, unique, small memoir of discovering urban bird watching while wrestling with middle age. On its surface, this book seems … strange. A memoir of urban bird watching? But there’s more here. Portlandia co-creator Carrie Brownstein says “We’re living on a million tiny stages. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. Dinner plates are showcases for our food, beds become venues for our slumber, selfies are curtain calls for our faces.” And as Kyo writes in this book “our economic growth model that assumes if you make something small (unless it is boutique and artisanal, and thus financially large or monumentally miniature), it is because you are somehow lacking and frail.” That is simply not true. We need to reject that idea as our world amplifies into 10x-ing everything, moonshots, and scale. This is a quiet, meditative book about life’s tiny beautiful things. A grounding perspective reset when the world feels too big.
13. P Is For Pteradactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Lushlife aka Raj Haldar. A is for Aisle. E is for Ewe. T is for Tsunami. And below each beautifully illustrated drawing is a tricky, head-scratching sentence. Like for the letter T it says: “The charging tsunami washed away all of Tchaikovsky’s tchotchkes.” The world is never what it seems. This book pulls up that curtain nicely for children.
12. Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. This is a non-fiction book that feels like a fairy-tale. Originally published in 1981 in Japan (where it sold nearly 5 million copies in its first year) it was finally translated to English thirty years later. Kuroyanagi was one of Japan’s most popular TV personalities for decades and this is a memoir of her childhood of joining a completely unconventional school near Tokyo during World War II. If you believe that trust and control are inversely related (like I do) you will love this book. You can read it as an innocent story of an unconventional childhood or a prickly indictment of the entire factory-style education system.
11. The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology by Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett. Years ago I was watching an NFL playoff game when they flashed a graphic onscreen that stuck with me. They showed two quarterbacks, drafted the same year, with the same type of college cred. One of them had one head coach on one team over his entire career and had been a huge success and won a handful of Superbowls. The other had the pleasure of playing under something like a dozen coaches across half a dozen teams. And guess what? Pretty much zero success. And we all hail the first guy as a hero! Best quarterback of all time! But is he? Is it really the person that we can objectively see here? Or is it the situation? What if I told you that when you perceive the actions and intentions of others you are pretty much mostly wrong? You do what we all do! You overvalue the person. And you undervalue the situation. This is a Big Idea book that will reorder how you look at the world. It will lay out the fallacies, assumptions, and leaps of logic you are constantly making. And it will do so in a kind, warm-hearted, empathetic, grizzled old professor type of way. It feels like you are sitting in a great college class. (Sidenote: This is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s three most formative books. Our 3 Books chat is right here.)
10. Meanwhile: Pick Any Path by Jason Shiga. Did you like Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid? If so, you’ll love this post-modern graphic novel with 3856 story possibilities (seriously!) all told through images and rampant flipping between pages. It’s head-twisting, it’s frenetic, it’s mad-scientist, but if you’re into puzzles or games (or your child is) then this is for you.
9. Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes. I try to read across as many genres as I can but one genre that’s been largely missing is the Celebrity Memoir. It’s not that I don’t like celebrities. It’s not that I don’t like memoirs. It’s just that I don’t like the celebrity memoir. Why? I guess I’m cynical about them. The book often feels part of a larger marketing plan cooked up in a Hollywood boardroom. Somebody’s having a moment! And so there’s movie billboards, an 8-episode podcast, a Vanity Fair feature, and, yes, a crappy book. Why do I go on this rant? Because Pete Holmes (Crashing, Dirty Clean, You Made It Weird) is a celebrity. And this is a memoir. But it’s not a celebrity memoir. It’s an incredibly well-written and hilarious coming-of-age story from a comedian at the top of his game. This book comes at you fast with a lot of uncomfortable moments and Pete’s unflinching honesty. The book talks about (yes) comedy, sex, and God because everything Pete does is underpinned by this gigantic gnawing “What is this?” feeling that we should really have about the whole universe. What is the universe? Why is it expanding? Expanding into what? Why are we here? How did we get here? What happens next? These are huge questions most of us put out of our mind to get through the day but Pete keeps touching and tapping up against them in this beautiful book.
8. Less by Andrew Sean Greer. When writer Arthur Less gets an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding he decides to accept a slew of half-baked authorly invitations around the world rather than shamefacedly attend as the awkward dateless former lover. What follows is an incredibly hilarious and woven tale through distant countries. First off, it feels like you are visiting everywhere he goes. How does he pull this off so well? You’re in Morocco, you’re in India, you’re in Japan. You’re traveling. You’re right there. You feel it. Second, it’s hilarious and laugh-out-loud maybe sorta like Barney’s Version or A Fraction of the Whole or Catch-22. And, finally, the finishing move: the entire book is written by an eloquent first-person-floating-over-the-scene narrator whose identity isn’t revealed until the final pages.
7. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. In the mid-80s, near the end of his life, famed professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell (Hero With A Thousand Faces) sat down at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch to record a six-hour PBS special exploring his ideas on religion, spirituality, symbolism, our connection to the planet, our connection to our past, and our existence in the universe in one super long conversation with journalist Bill Moyers. This book is a transcript of that conversation. Hugely mind-expanding with ideas about how we make sense of our world and what’s really below the surface of everything we see.
6. The Night Riders by Matt Furie. This children’s book has zero words in it … and is probably the book I read most often to my kids all year. What’s it about? Well, uh, okay, there are these two friends, a frog and a mouse, and they wake up in the middle of the night, eat some bug cereal for breakfast, and then walk out of their mushroom house, click open their garage door opener, and then hop on their bikes to go on a wild, fantastical, totally absurd late-night adventure featuring scary-not-scary dragons, a secret underground computer lab, and some dolphin surfing… all before finding a cliff to watch a beautiful sunrise at the end of their all-nighter. A wild night out without going out. Completely provokes the imagination because there are no words so your kids make up all the dialogue and plot details.
5. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. I think one of the ugliest things in the world today is the polished resume. Polished LinkedIn profiles! Polished everything! Too much polish. I like blemishes. Blemishes are interesting. Weird jobs, strange hobbies, gap years. Have you read Jordan Peterson’s bio? Regardless of what you think of the dude, talk about an interesting resume. When I interviewed candidates at Walmart I was most interested in those gaps and rough edges and the stuff painted outside the lines. Because that’s where the person had come from, how they grew, how they developed. Crucible moments where their character was forged. I think the increasing specialization of our world, at younger and younger ages, results in far too much fragility. Cognitive entrenchment! Being really great at one thing often means you’re pretty bad at lots of things. The jack of all trades is the next king of the world. A powerful book for those feeling wobbly in their career, wondering what’s next, or for anyone thinking all the tiny things they’ve done don’t amount to much. Actually, they amount to a lot. This book shows you why.
4. Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern. Howard Stern has essentially taken his forty years of hosting a daily morning show, chiseled away 99.99% of his interviews, and shaped the remaining few dozen into this exquisitely beautiful carving. Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Poehler, Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, and so many others let their guard down, ditch the talking points, and let the conversation bloom into vulnerable, revealing, and hugely insightful discussions offering an endless platter of illuminating insights on motivation, artistry, habits, and relationships. And if you’re interested in learning how to be a better interviewer then you’ll gain a ton here, too. Howard sounds like a guy hanging on the barstool beside you but in this book he reveals his deep preparation method and you get to watch it in action.
3. Don’t Touch my Hair by Sharee Miller. How do you teach children about boundaries? Read them this book. A wonderful story about a girl named Aria who has big, bouncy, curly hair that everybody wants to touch. After she has a big scream one day (“Don’t touch my hair!”) she learns that people need to ask permission to touch her hair and that she can feel confident saying yes or saying no. Pairs well with C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison, which I also loved.
2. Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips. I currently have this book in the gold medal spot on the writing book podium ahead On Writing by Stephen King (silver) or Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (bronze). Ernest Hemingway thought it was bad luck to talk about writing. So he didn’t! Or he thought he didn’t. But twenty-five years after he died journalist Larry W. Phillips combed through Hemingway’s personal letters to friends, editors, fellow writers, and critics, as well as interviews he conducted over his career, and pulled out the many wise and remarkable thoughts Hemingway shared on writing over his life. He then sort of shaped and sculpted them together by theme (“Working Habits”, “The Writer’s Life”, “Characters”, etc.) to produce this slender 140-page volume of endless nuggets. I circled so many quotes and made so many notes in the margins that I just ended up leaving it on my bedside table when I was done in the hopes that it will slowly merge into my subconscious. A gem for anyone that writes and wants to write better.
1. Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Day of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. I didn't put an official ranking beside my top books this year but if I was forced to then this would probably take top spot. An incredible book just stuffed to the brim with big ideas and big characters. Do you think drugs should be illegal? Which ones? Why? What happens when they’re not? What happened when they weren’t? Who made them illegal? Why? And what happened when they did? It turns out that precisely zero of the answers to these questions are obvious. This is a massively illuminating and mind expanding exploration of our relationship with drugs. Everyone should read it. It is at once a detailed history of the drug war, a buddy-beside-you-on-a-bus account of one man’s obsessive across-the-world dive into the abyss of the war on drugs, and a series of hopeful stories full of compassion and love that will honestly surprise you as you’re crying.
3 Ways To Increase Your Failure Rate To Help Spike Your Learning Rate
Fail more!
Fail fast!
Fail better!
These phrases are spouted endlessly these days but there’s one giant thing missing from the conversation: How. After all, we grew up thinking that less failure equals more success, right? And now here’s the world suddenly telling us to fail more.
In my research on resilience for my new #1 international bestseller You Are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle With Failure, and Live an Intentional Life I came across three specific tactics to thoughtfully achieve the “fail fast!” mantra.
Today I’m going to lay out these three ways to help accelerate your failure rate and therefore quicken your ability to suss out when you’re on the right path, when you should turn the other way, and when you should double down.
1. Go to parties (where you don’t know anyone)
Success blocks future success.
Say you get good at one thing and your brain, like my brain, wants to keep chasing that bunny. You struck oil? Pay dirt! You’re onto something good. The problem is that when you start making it and raking it, you’re also missing out on all the other options, all the other efforts, all the other potential flops that might have led you to even greater success, however you define it.
Say you get into real estate in your twenties, you sell a few condos, you feel like you’re really onto something. Great! But that also means you’re going to play the real estate game and maybe never fully realize that had you not quit ballet in your twenties, you might be on Broadway right now.
Success blocks future success.
The issue here is that when you’re good at one thing, the world conspires to keep you there. To make you stay in your lane. To make you stick to your specialty. That’s nobody’s fault. To move through this volatile, chaotic, and ambiguous and complicated world, we all need mental labels to filter and sort all the people in our lives. “You’re my real estate agent friend!”, your friends think. So when you chat with them at birthday parties, it’s about the market and interest rates and when they should sell. All those endless conversations serve to deepen your knowledge in that one area, make you more successful in this one area, and then crystallize your identity even further, making it harder and harder and harder to mentally break out, explore new ground, and try new things. Some researchers call this 'cognitive entrenchment.'
What’s the solution?
Go to parties.
Where you don’t know anyone.
Accept an invite to an event far away, hit a reading by an author you’ve never heard of, grab a ticket to a concert in a genre you never listen to, grab a cocktail at the hotel bar after your flight, attend the online meetup for an old passion you forgot you had—and, of course, go to parties.
Will it be awkward? Uncomfortable? Sometimes. Sometimes, sure. You might not meet anyone. You could have three superficial chats and connect with precisely nobody. You may leave feeling as though you just wasted your time. That’s the risk. That’s the downside. That’s the potential for failure.
But what’s the potential gain?
The potential gain is that you’ll meet interesting people in interesting places.
The potential gain is that you’ll drift into other lanes, go down new thinking paths, and you’ll slowly unfurl yourself from whatever mental sleeping bags you’re rolled up in.
And maybe your experience will provoke and prompt new ideas, new efforts, new risks, and new ventures that you’ll fail at and learn from.
2. Have a failure budget
Set aside money for failure? Am I joking?
No, I’m not! Set aside money for failure. Maybe it sounds odd. But come up with a figure that you can use just to try random stuff. Assume it will fail! But try it anyway. Maybe $20 at an oyster bar, $200 for a boxing class, or $1,000 to go to a distant music festival.
If it works for you to use an absolute number, great. That’s perfect. But if you’re not exactly a budgeter, I also have a mental model I use in my life that can be a simple way to think about this.
It involves deciding what figure game you’re in.
Call it the Number of Figures Game.
Let me explain.
When I was a kid and I started my first few websites, I was in the two-figure game. Ten dollars to buy a URL? Well, that expense was approved. But nothing else was! I knew I was in the two-figure game because I had no money.
What was my failure budget? Anything that cost two figures.
When I started 1000 Awesome Things, I moved to the three-figure game. I was a grown-up now. I had a job. I figured that if I wanted to try something, try anything, and it cost three figures or less—I would do it.
These days my podcast 3 Books is an example of me spending my failure budget. I really wanted to make a podcast that was ad free, sponsor free, commercial free, and just a piece of beautiful art. To me, anyway. So I spend around $5,000 a year making it. Flying to interview guests, production costs, recording equipment. It’s a four-figure “failure budget expense” that I love spending every year. Why? Because it’s vastly improved my learning rate, too.
Can you keep moving up? Sure. How high can you go? Well, if you’re a hip-hop star or tech billionaire, maybe you’re in the seven-figure game. The number depends on you. Your comfort level. Your risk tolerance.
My goal isn’t to tell you how many figures you should plan to spend on failures. It’s to give you a mental model you can apply in your life to accelerate your lose rate and therefore accelerate your win rate.
3. Count your losses
We always hear people say, “Count your blessings.”
But you know what we never count?
Our failures. Our losses. The times we hit the ground.
When we look at our flops, we’re really giving ourselves credit for all the learning and stamina and resilience baked into those moments when we made ourselves a little stronger.
One exercise we do in my family now is going around the dinner table playing a game called Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud. Roses are gratitudes or highlights, thorns are flops or failures, and buds are things we’re looking forward to. Even though the research on gratitude points to writing down five things you’re grateful for as a path to a healthier mind and body, what we find is that including the ‘thorn’ in the practice actually helps us even more.
Why?
Because it helps us slowly work against the natural muscle of “less failure equals more success” and train our brains to find the lessons and learnings that come from defeat or setbacks.
Counting up our losses and taking pride in our failures is really hard.
Really, really hard. We are taught to hide failure, feel ashamed of it. And here we are talking about wearing them as badges of honor.
What are some other ways to do it?
If you keep a journal, try writing down your successes and your flops. Be honest, and count your failures as they happen. Be kind to yourself by giving yourself credit for each one.
In a corporate setting, it means leaving the gaps on your resume or your LinkedIn profile. Even accentuating them by sharing your travels while you were between jobs or the six months you took off to be with your daughter after her second miscarriage. These failures, through the lens of a wise recruiter, actually strengthen who you are.
This is really hard for most people to do.
Because people can’t tiptoe around all their past failed relationships when they get into a new one. I’m not saying they should lay them out on the first date like a display case of painted ceramics. We don’t want to confuse counting failures with plain poor judgment! What I’m saying is that once you’ve built trust in a relationship, then lay them out. Be honest and share what you learned from each one.
This is really hard for people.
Because it means leaders can't pretend their resumes are an air-tight vacuum of perfection. "Here's the cherry-picked list of places I worked at with the cherry-picked results I delivered!" Bullllllllllshit. Nobody buys that. We know you're human. Do you know you're human? If you don't, then that's a bigger issue.
We don't trust people who haven't failed, and we really don't trust people who don't even know they haven't failed or like to pretend they haven't failed.
So, yes, indeed!
Fail more!
Fail faster!
Fail better!
Avoid cognitive entrenchment by increasing your failure rate to dramatically accelerate your learning rate.
Good luck!
I expand on these ideas above in my new book on resilience You Are Awesome: How To Navigate Change, Wrestle With Failure, and Live an Intentional Life
10 Small Habits To Get More Done Each Day
Do you feel like it’s getting harder to get stuff done?
It’s not just you. The distraction machine is cranked to 10. Endless apps and feeds and algorithms fight for our attention. They’re good at getting it, too! No wonder Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, says their greatest competitor of all is sleep.
I find myself revisiting simple practices to help make sure I actually get anything done.
Here are ten daily habits I use to get more done each day:
1. Wake up and look at your ikigai
An ikigai is the ‘reason you get out of bed in the morning.’
Leslie and I take simple blank index cards, fold them in half, and set them up like tent cards on our bedside table.
I think of the ikigai I write on the card as “my morning message to myself” and find it helps provide a quick north star to my day.
I change what I write on the cards. Sometimes I’ll get lofty and purposeful (“Helping people live happy lives”), sometimes I’ll get focused (“Finish writing the next book”), and sometimes I’ll just use the card as a way to neutralize anxiety (“To remember I have enough.”)
I write more about ikigais in The Happiness Equation and, if you want to go deeper, I recommend Héctor Garcia’s book Ikigai.
2. Two-Minute Mornings
You spent half a second staring at your ikigai card. Now what?
The next thing I do is grab my Two-Minute Mornings journal (or just any other index card is fine) and write my response to three prompts:
I will let go of…
I am grateful for…
I will focus on…
Research titled “Don’t look back in anger!” by Brassen, Gamer, Peters, Gluth, and Bluch in Science shows that minimizing regrets as we age creates greater contentment and happiness. I think there’s a big reason why confession and repentance show up across major world religions. Writing down and letting go of something feels like wiping a wet shammy across the blackboard of our minds. (I will let go of…)
Research by Emmons and McCullough shows if you write down five gratitudes a week you’re measurably happier over a ten week period. The more specific the better! Don’t write “my dog” ten days in a row. Try “When the rescue puppy we got during the pandemic finally stopped peeing on my husband’s pillow,” etc. (I am grateful for…)
As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney say in Willpower, “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rust-proof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy.” We all have too many decisions to make! So the last prompt helps carve a “will do” from our endless “could do” and “should do” lists. (I will focus on…)
Two-minute mornings helps prime your brain for positivity.
3. Lift something heavy
Every day I lift heavy weights I seem to buy myself the rest of the day without feeling stress. It’s like a magic pill. I don’t like lifting weights! But it’s worth it for that stress-free feeling for the next 24 hours.
Workouts such as Push/Pull/Legs or 5x5 are great but if you’re like me and you need a push — a cajoling of some kind — then I suggest an app I found during the pandemic which I still use today. It’s called Trainiac and I get a real human coach (hi Geoff!) who sets my routines, using the equipment I have or will have (i.e., at a hotel gym), and then sends me notes, prompts, messages, and videos to keep me going. I don’t know how to an exercise? I send him a video, he critiques my form. I have a question? He responds the next day.
To be clear: I’m not a sponsor of this app — I have no ads on any of my stuff and accept zero payments or credits, etc, etc — but I’ve just been using it since the pandemic and enjoy it. I did personal training (like in person, at a gym) years ago but found it time and cost prohibitive.
I personally set my goal for four workouts a week and then if I “fail” and only get three in I still feel good. What about no workout days? I throw my kids in the air for a few minutes. I’m winded after! And we both feel great.
4. Walk 5km a day
Guess what average human walking speed is?
5km/hour.
So just moving one phone meeting to a “walk and talk” helps get that 5km of walking in. I personally find that I’m actually more focused on the phone call when I’m walking because I’m not surrounded by the endless distractions of screens. Plus, it’s good for your health, good for community connection (you actually talk to your neighbors!), and walking tends to stoke your creativity, too. And, side benefit, it brings out your inner birder.
For more on walking I recommend “Walking” by Henry David Thoreau (free out of copyright full version) or “Why I Do All This Walking” by Nassim Taleb (Scribd link, with full essay in The Black Swan.)
5. Schedule one UNTOUCHABLE day a week
Okay, this isn’t a daily habit but a weekly one. I’m sneaking it in anyway because it’s so powerful.
A New Yorker feature by Alexandra Schwartz calls our focus on productivity and hustle “improving ourselves to death.” She writes, “It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts — then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.”
What’s one solution? Untouchable Days. These are days where I am literally unreachable, by anyone, in any way — all day. My productivity is about 10 times higher on these days.
I know on the surface this idea sounds completely impractical and I mostly get scoffing and head shakes when I start talking about it. But, I also get more emails from people successfully using this concept across a vast array of ages and careers. If it sounds too hard, there’s nothing wrong with starting with an Untouchable Lunch. Leave your phone at your desk and get outside for an hour where nobody can reach you.
I go deeper on this concept in this viral HBR article and in my book on resilience.
6. Read 20 (or even 2!) pages of fiction a day
The Annual Review of Psychology published a report that says books are medicine.
Books create empathy, intimacy, compassion, and understanding. Why? Our brain’s mirror neurons fire when we read about experiences we haven’t lived — when we’re another gender, in another country, in another time … our minds think we’re there.
It’s like that Game of Thones quote: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies … the man who never reads lives only one.”
Now, the troubling stat is that the American Time Use Survey says that 57% of Americans read zero books last year. Zero! Meanwhile we’re spending over 5 hours a day on our phone.
But Science magazine published a formative study in 2013 which showed that reading literary fiction improved test results measuring social perception and empathy. So if we can channel a few minutes of phone time each day to reading fiction, we’ll have a natural way to zoom out of our problems and feel more connected to the wider world.
7. “Wear one suit.”
It’s a principle.
I wear a blue suit jacket, white dress shirt, dark blue jeans, Nike running shoes, and my yellow watch … to every single speech and media interview I do. So I never think about what to wear for any of them. I just buy multiples of the same running shoes, shirts, socks, etc.
Same thing with my breakfast. “Drink one shake.” I’ve been drinking the same shake for fifteen years. Water, turmeric, cinnamon, half a frozen banana, powdered greens, frozen greens, protein, nut butter, nut milk, yogurt, avocado. Sure, maybe I change the protein flavor once in a while, but the point is that I can make it on auto-pilot.
What can you systemize to free up more brain space for everything else?
8. Write a “3 things” cue card
Every night before I go up to bed I write an index card with tomorrow’s day up top — TUESDAY — and a (maximum) 3-item checklist below. Beside each item I draw a square box to be checked off.
Why? Well, a laundry list of 20 things feels overwhelming and oppressive. (That can go on a weekly or monthly checklist.) But the nighttime forced prioritization helps me go to bed knowing I have my track set for the next day. And by making it only 3 I’ve done some of the hard work of simply choosing what not to do.
Also, one principle within the last? “Write first.” What I mean is that writing takes more of my energy than anything else I do so if the day includes writing I’ll put that first. (You may have heard a similar principle for going to the gym: “Squat first.” Just start with the hardest thing.)
9. Lock the phone up around sunset
University of Bologna professors published a report in Sloan Management Review which showed that anxiety spikes when students don’t have their cellphones for even a single day.
Everyone talks about intermittent fasting … with food. We should be talking about intermittent fasting … with phones.
When I interviewed Johann Hari (author of Stolen Focus) he told me he drops his phone in a K-Safe every night. That’s a big square plastic box with a timer on the outside. Set the timer to 3 hours? It doesn’t open for 3 hours.
Now: Why do I say “around sunset”? Well, because I’m trying (trying!) to get my body more in line with natural light. When the sun dips down I want my brain to dip down, too. Dimmer lights. Candles at dinner. Less screens. More books.
Easing my body and mind into a darker, deeper sleep.
Also, if you don’t have a K-Safe or timed lockbox you can try my strategy of asking your partner to “Please hide my phone until tomorrow and don’t tell me where it is even if I ask.”
10. Have a “wind down” routine.
One more study: Research from Australia shows that exposing our brains to bright screens before bed reduces melatonin production — the sleep hormone.
So screens mess up our sleep. Great! Now what do we do? Well, we’ve already talked about reading. But what I mean here is you need a nighttime ritual. Maybe it’s playing Rose Rose Thorn Bud with your boyfriend. Maybe it’s flossing and brushing your teeth with your wife. Maybe it’s reading books to your kids. Maybe it’s tidying up your dresser and setting out your clothes for the next morning. Maybe it’s having a warm shower and shaving.
We need to plug our phones in the basement. (I recommend the furnace room — darker and cobwebbier, the better!) And have a nighttime ritual that allows us the mental space to widen, reflect, and process the day in a slow and peaceful way.
That’s it! A long list, sure. And a lofty one! But, as always, as with anything I’m suggesting or trying myself, the goal is never to be perfect — it’s just to be a little better than before.
I hope even one or two of these will resonate with you. And if you have something you suggest adding to my list — just drop me a line and let me know.
Figure out your dream job by asking yourself this question
In the late 1990s I began an undergrad business degree program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After nearly flunking Economics 101 and striking out with a majority of sports and teams, I finally found my home among a group of interfaculty misfits at the Golden Words comedy newspaper.
Golden Words was the largest weekly humor newspaper in the country, an Onion-esque paper publishing 25 issues per year, with a new issue every Wednesday during the school year. For the next four years, I spent every Sunday hanging out with a group of people writing articles that made us all laugh. We got together around noon and wrote until the wee hours of Monday morning. I didn’t get paid a cent, but the thrill of creating, laughing, and seeing my work published gave me a great high.
I loved it so much that I took a job working at a New York City comedy writing startup during my last summer of college. I rented an apartment on the Lower East Side and started working in a Brooklyn loft with writers from The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do what I love.”
But it was the worst job of my life.
Why your dream job could be the worst job you ever have
Instead of having creative freedom to write whatever I wanted, I had to write, say, “800 words about getting dumped” for a client like Cosmopolitan. Instead of joking with friends naturally and finding chemistry writing with certain people, I was scheduled to write with others. Eventually my interest in comedy writing faded, and I decided I would never do it for money again.
When I started writing my blog 1000 Awesome Things in 2008, I said I’d never put ads on the website. I knew the ads would feel like work to me, and I worried that I might self-censor or try to appeal to advertisers. No income from the blog meant less time trying to manage the ads and more time focused on the writing, I figured.
I was smart about that… but not smart enough to ignore the other extrinsic motivators that kept showing up: stat counters, website awards, bestseller lists. It was all so visible, so measurable, and so tempting. Over time I found myself obsessing about stat counters breaking 1 million then 10 million then 50 million, about the book based on my blog staying on bestseller lists for 10 weeks then 100 weeks then 200 weeks, about book sales breaking five figures then six figures then seven figures. The extrinsic motivators never ended, and I was slow to realize that I was burning myself out. I was eating poorly, sleeping rarely, and obsessing about whatever next number there was to obsess about.
I started worrying that the cycle — set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal — would never end. And I started forgetting why I started writing my blog in the first place. I was shaken by how quickly I had gotten caught up in the achievement trap.
Studies show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. The interest we have becomes lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire.
Keep in mind that there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is internal — you’re doing it because you want to. Extrinsic is external — you’re doing it because you get something for it. Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has performed some experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators with college students. She asked the students to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work, and some were not. What happened? Based on scores from independent judges, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work. Amabile said, “It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest.”
And it’s not just getting rewards that hurts quality. In another study conducted by Amabile, 72 creative writers at Brandeis University and Boston University were split into three groups of 24 and asked to write poetry. The first group was given extrinsic reasons for doing so — impressing teachers, making money, getting into fancy grad schools. The second group was given a list of intrinsic reasons — enjoying the feeling of expressing themselves, the fun of playing with words. The third group wasn’t given any reason. On the sidelines, Amabile put together a group of a dozen poet-judges, mixed up all the poems, and had the judges evaluate the work. Far and away, the lowest-quality poems were from those who had the list of extrinsic motivators.
James Garbarino, former president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development, was curious about this phenomenon. He conducted a study of fifth- and sixth-grade girls hired to tutor younger children. Some of the tutors were offered free movie tickets for doing a good job. What happened? The girls who were offered free movie tickets took longer to communicate ideas, got frustrated more easily, and did a worse job than the girls who were given nothing except the feeling of helping someone else.
The Garbarino study raises the question: Do extrinsic motivators affect us differently depending on age? Do we grow into this pattern — and can we grow out of it? According to a recent study by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, we may be hardwired to behave this way. Their work found that if infants as young as 20 months are extrinsically rewarded after helping another infant, they are less likely to help again than infants who received either no reward or simple social praise.
The secret to avoiding burnout
I was surprised by the studies, but they made sense to me. I loved writing for Golden Words. It was a joy, a thrill, a true love. With the paid writing startup in New York City, I lost all my energy and drive.
When you’re doing something for your own reasons, you do more, go further, and perform better. When you don’t feel like you’re competing with others, you compete only with yourself. For example, Professor Edward Deci of the University of Rochester conducted a study where he asked students to solve a puzzle. Some were told they were competing with other students and some were not. You can probably guess what happened. The students who were told they were competing with others simply stopped working once the other kids finished their puzzles, believing themselves to be out of the race. They ran out of reasons to do the puzzle. But those who weren’t told they were competing with others kept going once their peers finished.
Does all this mean you should just rip up your paycheck and work only on things you’re intrinsically motivated to do? No. But you should ask yourself, “Would I do this for free?” If your answer is yes, you’ve found something worth working on. If the answer is no, let paid work remain paid work and keep asking yourself what you would do simply for the pleasure you derive from doing it. Chances are, if you’re working solely for extrinsic reasons such as money, you’re bound to burn out sooner or later.
An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review
The Most Surprising Advice On Success I Received From A Harvard Dean
Ever suck at what you’re doing?
Of course you do. We all do! We sign up for things we don’t start. We start things we don’t finish. We end up somewhere and look around with no idea how we got there.
Maybe you moved to a neighborhood where everybody is way richer than you and has a fancier car. You took a job at a company where everybody speaks in codes you don’t understand.
You got married and had a child with someone you’re not sure you like. We make mistakes. Part of living is putting ourselves in new situations but sometimes these situations are wildly uncomfortable or end badly. Sometimes you just want to press the eject button and blast off to Mars.
That’s how I felt for much of my time at Harvard. I respected the school, I was wowed by the professors, I loved my classmates, but I just didn’t relate to the careers I saw grads heading toward.
Why would I want to sit in a windowless boardroom helping a rich company get richer by telling them how to fire ten thousand people? Why would I want to help two companies merge just to satisfy some billionaire CEO’s ego? Why would I want to slave away on a marketing team desperate to sell the world more air fresheners?
These jobs made no sense!
But then again... they paid so much money. If the world is built on gears and cranks, a lot of these jobs were spinning them.
I felt I wanted the lifestyle the school was leading me toward but at the same time it didn’t make sense to me.
This is the context when I heard a story from Dean John McArthur that resonated deeply and which I think about every time I’m trying to get stronger.
Let me share it now.
The life-changing story from the dean
When I got into Harvard Business School they asked to see my tax returns from the past three years to assess me for financial aid. So I gathered all the paperwork. And my income added up to less than $50,000... total... for three years.
Why?
Well, I’d scored a doughnut three years earlier because I was still a college student. And I’d scored another doughnut when I was running my restaurant and couldn’t afford to take a salary.
And between those two goose eggs was my Procter & Gamble salary of $51,000 plus bonus. Or at least part of it, since I hadn’t made it through a full year there.
I was embarrassed sending in the numbers to Harvard but delighted a couple months later when I got a letter in the mail saying “Congratulations! You are so poor we are going to pay for you to come here!”
Finding out I suddenly didn’t need $70,000 of student loans felt like I’d just won the Powerball. But I’d received a lot of phone calls offering me free Caribbean cruises over the years so I read the letter again to make sure it was legit.
Turns out it was legit.
Turns out me and many other Canadian students were recipients of the John H. McArthur Canadian Fellowship.
John McArthur was the dean of Harvard Business School from 1980 to 1995 and, a Canadian himself, he established a fellowship to pay tuition for any Canadian who got into the school and wasn’t sitting on wads of cash.
I felt an incredible swell of love for this random old man who I had never met, so when I got to Harvard I spent an entire night writing a five page thank-you letter sharing my life story, my failures, everything that had led me to this point, and everything I wanted to do afterward.
Before I could second guess whether he wanted a super-long letter from a total stranger, I sealed it with a kiss and dropped it in a mailbox in Harvard Square.
A few weeks later I got a phone call from John McArthur’s office inviting me to lunch with the sugar daddy himself!
I must have sounded nervous on the phone because the assistant had to calm me down. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’d just like to meet you.” Then she whispered, “We don’t get many five-page thank-you letters.”
So between classes a couple weeks later, I found John McArthur’s office behind tall oak trees in a vine-covered building in a corner of campus.
I was escorted in. He swiveled around on his desk chair, smiled, got up, and shook my hand.
“Neil, have a seat,” he said, and gestured toward the circular table in the middle of the room, where two boxed sandwiches were sitting.
“Hope you like tuna.”
He patiently waited for me to choose from the many chairs to sit on and then picked the chair right beside me. He was wearing a casual button-up cardigan and thick glasses that wobbled on his nose. And he smiled so warmly, like an old friend—humble, gracious, down to earth.
I found this especially amazing as there seemed to be an incredibly famous painting on the wall behind him. Was that a Picasso?
He caught me looking at it. “Oh, that,” he said. “Some foreign leader gave it to us as a present. We couldn’t put it up in the dean’s residence on account of the, uh...”
I stared at the picture as his voice trailed off and noticed it looked like a painting of a bull sporting a gigantic blue boner.
I laughed and we started chatting.
“So, how’s school going so far?” he asked.
“Oh, you know, stressful. We started classes a few weeks ago, and I’m up past midnight every night reading cases and preparing for them. And the companies have already started visiting campus. Everybody wants to work at the same five places, so we’re chugging beers with millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under their eyes hoping we can become millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under our eyes, too.”
He raised his eyebrows and laughed.
There was a pause.
And then he told me a story that changed my life and, looking back, was worth more to me than all the tuition he was so generously covering for me.
So get off the beach
“Neil, right now you’re just an eager guy standing outside the beach,” he began. “You’re standing at the fence looking in. The beach is closed, but it’s opening soon. You can see the sand, you can smell the ocean, you can see a half-dozen beautiful people sunbathing in bathing suits. But you know who’s beside you at the fence? A thousand other eager folks just like you. They’re all eager. They’re all gripping that fence. They all want on that beach. And when the door to the fence opens, they’re all running on to the hot sand and trying to seduce the same few sunbathers. Your odds of winning any of them over are so low.”
I nodded. I had been through campus recruiting at Queen’s.
It was painful. Hundreds of hours researching companies, tailoring resumes, writing cover letters, filling out online applications, doing practice interviews, buying clothes for interviews, researching all the interviewers before I met them, writing and sending thank-you notes, and then the giant stress of waiting weeks or months for replies.
“So get off the beach,” he said.
“Let the thousand other folks run in and fight each other. Let them bite and claw and scratch each other. And sure, let a few of them win over one of those few sunbathers. But it’s much better to get off the beach. Because even if you happen to win, do you know what you would be doing the whole time on that beach? Looking over your shoulder. Seeing who else is going to stake their claim and send you packing. You probably won’t win in any case. But if you do, you win a life full of stress.”
I was in a state of permanent anxiety on campus. I was anxious about classes because I was anxious about grades and I was anxious about grades because I was anxious about jobs and I was anxious about jobs because I was anxious about money.
And here was this man offering relief.
“But if I don’t land one of those jobs,” I said, “I’ll be broke. I got your fellowship because I didn’t have any money. I was hoping to correct that problem.”
He laughed.
“You’ll be fine. It’s simple economics. There are far more problems and opportunities in the world than there are talented and hard-working people to solve them. The world needs talent and hard work to solve its problems so people with talent who are hard workers will have endless opportunities.”
His words felt like calamine lotion rubbed on the bright red burn itching at the center of my soul. What he was saying was... different.
“So,” I asked him, cautiously furthering the metaphor, “if I leave the beach, where do I go?”
“What do you think you offer?” he asked. “You’re young. You have little experience. But you’re learning. You’re passionate. You give people energy and ideas. And who needs that? Not the fancy companies flying here in private jets. It’s the broken companies. The bankrupt companies. The ones losing money. The ones struggling. They need you. The last thing they’re doing is flying teams to Harvard recruiting sessions. But if you knock on their doors and if you get inside, then they will listen to your ideas, give you big jobs with lots of learning, and they’ll take you seriously. You’ll participate in meetings instead of just taking notes. You’ll learn faster, gain experience quicker, and make changes to help a place that actually needs help.”
There was a long pause as I digested what I was actually hearing.
Think about this for a second.
Harvard Business School had an army of people dedicated to planning, executing, and guiding students through campus recruiting. It was a giant department. Career visioning workshops. Job posting boards. Information sessions. Beer nights and company dinners. First, second, third round interviews on campus. And here I was sitting in front of the Dean who was telling me to set a match to it all. Ignore it completely and call up a pile of broken and bankrupt places. I left that lunch and never applied for another job through the school again. Not a single info session, not a single job posting, not a single interview. I just went back to my apartment and made an Excel spreadsheet. I filled it with a list of all the broken, beaten down companies I could think of. Places that were doing something interesting but had fallen on hard times. A big oil spill. A plummeting stock price. A massive layoff. A failed launch. A big PR problem.
Reputation in the toilet.
I came up with about a hundred company names. I then wrote up a 30-second cold call script saying I was a student studying leadership and would love to ask a couple questions to a leader in Human Resources. I cold called all hundred companies.
I got in the door with maybe half of them and then followed up with them to say thank you, share a couple articles, and ask to meet for coffee or lunch. About a dozen took me up on the offer.
And after those dozen conversations, I wrote thank you letters and followed up asking for a summer job.
I got five offers.
And all five were from companies off the beach.
I took a job at Walmart and found I was the only person with a master’s degree... in an office of over a thousand people.
Dean McArthur’s advice paid off. I was suddenly a big fish in a small pond. All my peers from Harvard were long gone. They were crunching Excel spreadsheets in glass towers. I was sitting on ripped chairs beside piles of old cardboard boxes in a low-rise building in the burbs.
But I loved it. I had work to do. I had real problems to solve.
At Walmart I found I was one of a handful of people quoting fresh research and case studies since I’d just read and reviewed so much at school. There was a ton I didn’t know. I had no retail experience! No store operations experience! No Walmart experience! But the things I did know were different from what my colleagues knew.
And different is better than better.
I spent the summer designing, planning, and running the first internal leadership conference at the company.
It was a hit.
Then, on my last day of the summer job, the head of HR handed me a full-time job offer with a primo starting salary pasted on top.
I was way off the beach.
And it felt great.
What’s wrong with the $5 million condo?
What did I learn from Dean McArthur’s beach story?
Find the small ponds so you can be the big fish. When I was at Harvard Business School I was below average in everything. Grades, class participation, whatever you were measuring, I was in the bottom half. I was a little fish in a big pond of high achievers from around the world. I never felt great about what I was accomplishing there. I was always on the low end of the totem pole. I think about this a lot when I see ads on the inside covers of fancy magazines advertising new Manhattan condos starting at $5 million. That’s a little fish in a big pond right there! $5 million means you have the worst condo in the entire building. No view, no prestige, no nothing. Who would drop money on that kind of pain when $5 million could buy you a penthouse suite almost anywhere else?
When I started at Walmart, I was different. And different really is better than better.
My degree wasn’t immediately neutralized by being rounded by tables of people with fancy degrees. At Walmart, I was worth something. So my confidence went up. My “I can do this!” feeling rose and rose and rose.
Don’t start swimming in the biggest pond you can find. Start in the smallest. Don’t chase the hot guy or hot girl at the beach. Find the nerd at the library. Find the broken company.
Find the place nobody wants to be.
And start there.
Dean McArthur’s advice worked so well for me I started using it in other areas of my life, too.
Sometimes it was conscious.
Sometimes it wasn’t.
But it always worked.
When I began doing paid keynote speeches, my speaking agency suggested a starting fee range that seemed super high to me.
“Summarize everything you’ve learned from your research and experiences in an hour, fly wherever people want you to be, deliver it all live in front of a thousand people, and make sure you’re entertaining, educational, and empowering. It’s a hard job! You should be paid well for it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That seems too high. Who else is in that range?”
They listed a slew of people. New York Times bestselling authors, gold medal–winning Olympians, rock star professors. I’d heard of them all.
“Hmm,” I said. “What about half that price?”
They listed a bunch of people I’d never heard of before.
“And what about half that?” I asked.
“There is no half that,” they said. “That’s the lowest range. It doesn’t make sense for us to work for months and spend hours on conference calls and manage all logistics for commissions on speeches below a certain level.”
“Okay,” I said. “Start me at your lowest range, please.”
The agency didn’t love it but by giving speeches at a lower price I got booked for smaller conferences and events. I was in local boardrooms with fifty people instead of Vegas casinos with a thousand. My confidence went up. And it stayed up as I moved onto bigger stages.
I looked into the research underpinning the small pond line of thinking, and it turns out it’s only thirty years old. Back in 1984 a study by Herb Marsh and John W. Parker appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It asked a very simple and incisive question: “Is it better to be a relatively large fish in a small pond even if you don’t learn to swim as well?”
The research in the study provided the clear answer.
Yes.
It is.
That study was the lead domino in a slew of studies around the globe that confirmed the same incredible result.
Regardless of age, socioeconomic background, nationality, or cultural upbringing, when you’re in a smaller pond, your opinion of yourself what’s called “academic self-concept”—goes up. And importantly, it stays up even after you leave the pond. This is because two opposing forces present themselves: fitting into the group you’re with and a contrasting belief of feeling “better than this group.” Our brains like that second feeling, and it sticks with us as we realize “Hey, I can do this” or “Hey, I can maybe do better than this.”
What’s another way to think about it?
Ask yourself one key question.
Would you rather be a 5 in a group of 9s, a 9 in a group of 9s, or a 9 in a group of 5s?
The most impressive results of these studies say that being a 9 in a group of 5s increases your positive academic self-concept even ten years after you leave the group.
Put yourself in a situation where you think you’re a big deal.
Guess what? You’ll think you’re a big deal for a long, long time.
And the studies saw these results across a wide range of countries in both individual and collectivist cultures around the globe.
So I say there’s no shame putting yourself in situations where you feel really good about yourself. Should you downgrade yourself? No! Definitely no. But there’s nothing wrong with entering the marathon in the slowest category. Playing in the house league instead of the rep league. Teeing off from the tee closest to the pin.
You know what you’re doing?
Setting yourself up for success.
You’ll move up because you believe in yourself.
Now, is there a danger here? Can you think you’re such a big a deal that you damage relationships or hurt others? Yes! That’s the fire we’re playing with. Do you ever wonder why so many celebrities get divorced after they first become famous? Maybe it’s because their academic self-concept skyrocketed! They think they’re a huge fish! And suddenly the small pond marriage they’re in feels way too small. So they jump into a bigger pond and date a superstar.
Why do I mention this? Because it’s about self awareness.
We have to be aware of which pond we’re swimming in and be kind as we swim. Finding small ponds isn’t an excuse to act arrogantly and feel boastful. We’re not trying to spike volleyballs into kindergarten foreheads here.
We’re using a proven science-backed way to be kind to ourselves, swim in the shallows, and help ourselves slowly, slowly, slowly get all the way up to awesome.
Find small ponds.
This article is an excerpt from my new book You Are Awesome
Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud: The simple gratitude game my wife and I play before bed
THIS JUST IN! Leslie and I made a journal based on this viral article! Check it out here!
Guess what?
If you can be happy with simple things then it will be simple to be happy.
Back in 2003, researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked groups of students to write down five gratitudes, five hassles or five events that happened over the past week for 10 straight weeks. What happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier than the other two test groups.
I’ve given speeches sharing this research for a while but I was always left with a nagging question. What if you simply don’t have the willpower to write down five gratitudes? I hope you do. I hope I do! But what if you don’t? I mean, when was honestly the last time you did that?
Well, today I want to share a little game my wife Leslie and I play at the end of the night just before we turn off the lights that completely solves this problem.
It’s called Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud.
Rose
What was a highlight from the day? Leslie shares something she’s grateful for. A highlight. First thing that pops to mind! “When our son ran up to see me after preschool,” “the half hour of silence I got when both kids were napping,” “I found construction paper in the basement for a craft before dinner.” Can you tell she’s a busy mom? And then after she says a rose, I say one back to her from my day. “My new book is starting to get Goodreads reviews,” “I bumped into Marcel at the coffee shop,” or “I listened to a great episode of The Knowledge Project.” “Getting to write for smart and attractive readers through my blog and email list.” You get the idea.
Rose
Then what? We do it a second time. Another rose from her, another rose from me. For those doing the math at home that’s four gratitudes generally in less than a minute here. Remember: the research shows you only need five a week. What’s next?
Thorn
What didn’t go well today? Nobody is endlessly positive. It’s important to be heard. It’s important to be listened to. “Our son was sad and crying at dropoff,” “I had a stressful phone call with a relative,” “I didn’t get as much done as I wanted.” This is a chance to show empathy and compassion while letting your partner get something off their chest. Very important!
And then we close with a ...
Bud
A bud is something you’re looking forward to … tomorrow, next week, or 20 years down the road. “Brunch with my sister on Saturday,” “when that new Chipotle finally opens” or “the moment next summer when we’re able to canoe into perfectly silent water during sunrise.” The last thought is a little dream of something to come.
What does Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud do in practice?
Well, as long as the Thorn doesn’t become a 45-minute argument about who didn’t do the dishes, it’s a perfect two-minute exercise to grab four gratitudes right before bed. Also works great at the dinner table or during the commute! Remember: you only need five a week. So playing this game even two or three times in your week helps you focus your mind.
As Charles Dickens said: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many, not your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
Check out the video version of this article:
THIS JUST IN! Leslie and I made a journal based on this viral article! Check it out here!
7 Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned From Mel Robbins
I met Mel Robbins at the Caesars Palace pool in Vegas.
It was a few years back and we were speaking at the same conference. I flew in the day before my speech and she was staying the day after hers so we had a bit of overlap.
I managed to catch the end of her speech and watched as she turned an entire audience just electric. People were laughing like they were at a standup show, crying like it was the end of The Shawshank Redemption, and you could just feel something special was bubbling up inside everyone. She did the hardest thing to do as a speaker – completely shift the energy in the room. At the end everybody rose up into one of the longest standing ovations I’d seen. I decided to join the scrum waiting to talk to Mel afterwards and then we exchanged phone numbers and vaguely agreed to meet by the pool later. I said I was going to the gym, she said they had dinner plans with a friend and their daughters, and the pool is like a thousand people anyway, so who knew if it would really happen.
But a few minutes later a picture of an icy pina colada with a chunk of pineapple in a plastic Caesars Palace cup arrived by text message saying “This is waiting for you.”
It was the first text I ever got from Mel. I learned pretty quickly she doesn’t do anything half-assed. Since then I’ve watched as Mel has become the most-booked female speaker in the world, sold more books through Audible’s self-publishing platform than anyone, and is now about to launch The Mel Robbins Show on daytime TV this September 16th.
But more than all the accolades is the person underneath. As I’ve gotten to know Mel I’ve found her so dynamic, magnetic, and endlessly captivating. She connects with people, very quickly, on their deepest level. When she starts talking you can’t stop listening because her words feels like a little hammer pinging at the nerves in your heart. She’s like a wise old Ivy League academic but gabbing with you like your mom at the kitchen table at two in the morning.
And since I don’t go very often from sipping pina coladas by a pool with someone to watching them launch their own national TV show I thought it would be worth looking back and reflecting on seven things I’ve learned from Mel Robbins over the past few years.
Here they are:
7. Don’t say you’re authentic. Be authentic.
A few times I’ve forwarded Mel’s weekly newsletter over to my wife Leslie. The first time I did so she wrote “Wow, she wrote you such a long note!” I said “No, that’s her newsletter. It goes out to like half a million people.” She couldn’t believe it because the writeup was so personal. She was talking about “leaking” after having three kids and recommending people check out pelvic physio and, larger scale, confront the little things they’ve been putting off because they’re too worried or embarrassed to address them. She was pinching her stomach fat rolls and making a hashtag for them while encouraging everyone to love their bodies and do the same.
I wrote a list of my favorite newsletters and for Mel’s I wrote that it feels like I’m hanging out behind the scenes with an A-list celebrity who’s somehow radically self-aware, authentic, and even self-critical.
A good example is how she’s been sharing the news about her new TV show. The common trope when something huge happens is to be all humble-braggy about it. You know, “I can’t believe this is even happening!!!”, “I am so surprised and humbled by this!!!”, and hashtag blessed and all.
Mel’s approach has been so different, so authentic.
She’s been talking about having dreams when you were a kid that are almost so ambitious you don’t want to admit them to yourself or others. Becoming an astronaut! Working for Disney! Headlining a concert! And then she shares that having a TV show has been one of those dreams for her and then she openly shares how she got there.
She never spoke about her TV show with lines like “OMG I GOT STRUCK BY LIGHTNING IT’S CRAY CRAY!” That angle has never resonated with me because we all know you killed for it so why not just tell us you killed for it?
It’s the truth. It’s refreshing. It’s authentic.
6. It’s okay to cry.
Have you ever cried at work?
Or seen someone cry at work?
What does almost everyone do when that happens?
Urgently grab for tissues. Shake their head and wipe them away. Say “Ugh, I’m so sorry.” Head to the bathroom. We try to cover it up. Of course we do. We have spent decades preaching stoic virtues of keeping it all together and even shaming our more natural human tendencies in professional settings. No intimacy! No hugs! No tears!
But not Mel! I have seen her crying a dozen times and her reaction always surprises me.
What does she do?
First, she doesn’t hold back the tears. They don’t come with that usual embarrassment or silly attempt to cover them up. They just come. And then, even more surprising, she announces it!
“I’m tearing up right now” or “Oh my gosh, I am crying” or something similar. It’s incredibly humanizing and gives permission to those around her who are also feeling big emotions … to feel it, too.
I have been in so many work meetings or company conferences over the years where something profound has been said, a really touching service story has been shared, or maybe an emotional video has just played. And whenever I look around the room in these moments most people are blinking really fast or quietly dabbing the corners of their eyes. A normal reaction! We try to cover it up.
But lately when these moments have happened and I have found myself on stage or with the mic I have tried channeling Mel and simply saying “That was beautiful … I’m tearing up.” And then what happens? You can feel the giant emotion in the room just release. Everyone blossoms. People smile, let tears flow, and ditch the embarrassment.
In many ways Mel taught me how to give space for deep emotions in group settings.
In a world where “holding it together” is more typically praised, but where we all feel things all the time, this is a huge gift.
It’s okay to cry.
5. Screw the script.
Mel has sold more books off Audible’s self-publishing platform than anyone. (I just checked and she has over 50,000 reviews on there across her books.) The book that launched her on the platform was The 5-Second Rule.
But here’s the funny thing.
If you download and listen to The 5-Second Rule it doesn’t sound like an audiobook. You hear papers ruffling, you hear her messing up and swearing afterwards, you hear her going on wild tangents way off script.
When I asked her about it she said “We hired a producer off Craigslist and he had never submitted a recording to Audible before. I don’t think we paid him for post-production. We didn’t think to. He didn’t think to. So he just uploaded the whole file without taking out all the mistakes. Like he didn’t edit it at all.”
Well, turns out the “mistakes” are what’s popular. From a few of the top reviews:
I felt like she was in the car with me. I appreciated the mistakes that were left in, rather than edited out.
It's refreshing how Mel Robbins doesn't sugar coat anything. She says it exactly how it is, no BS. On a side note, there are parts of the recording where Mel obviously screws up and has to repeat herself and start sentences over. She could've edited that out but she didn't and I feel there is something so raw and authentic about that.
I felt more like I was speaking with Mel as opposed to her speaking at me… fantastic, transformational wisdom…
Audiobooks sound so polished and professional. Big name actors! Perfect voices. But is that what we want? Think of the feeling you get when you pick up an expensive and fancy real estate agent brochure in your mailbox with a glossy sheen and full color pictures on cardstock … compared to the little handwritten note. Think of the big chain with a thirty-foot tall neon sign out front, uniformed teenage employees, and scripted questions… compared to the mom and pop shop on the side of the road.
Which do you prefer?
I gave a speech called “Building Trust in Distrustful Times” at SXSW this year and one of my arguments was that “In an era of bots we trust brains.”
The world we are designing for ourselves is so… perfect now. We actually crave more human experiences. With flaws. And mistakes. And no makeup. (As a side note, Mel once told me the most common note she gets on her YouTube videos is “I’m glad you don’t wear makeup in them”)
There’s a huge lesson here.
Mel has sold thousands of books on Audible. This is a book that was self-published. No publisher! No one who knew what was going on was involved! She booked a booth. She hired a producer. Entrepreneurial, sure! But then when you listen you hear her ruffling the papers, getting lost in the script and saying “Oh, fuck”, her laughing at herself when she screws up. And all these other million tiny pieces of humanity.
What’s the lesson? Have a script. Then screw the script.
4. Shout your flaws.
Mel has ADD.
No, not in the way people say it when they lose their keys or while giggling at a party after forgetting the name of the person they just met. I mean Mel has clinical ADD and takes medication for it.
She can’t remember chunks of her twenties because her severe anxiety at that age was so debilitating.
She also spent a lot of years on Zoloft.
How do I know all this?
Because she talks about it openly. And by sharing the challenges she’s faced, and is facing, she makes it easy for people to open up to her.
I think that’s part of the reason why podcasts are growing so rapidly. The big name podcast hosts sound so human. They shout their flaws! Rich Roll talking about his alcoholism, Pete Holmes talking about his sex life. What used to be TMI can now be the most vulnerable and human way to connect.
What’s another benefit of shouting your flaws? I interviewed famed restaurateur Jen Agg on my podcast 3 Books and asked her why she posted on Instagram a long and radically self-aware list of her flaws. What did she say? “In a weird way, it’s a defense strategy. Because it’s like ‘here they all are.’ Now what are you going to say about me? Or do to me? You got nothing. I already said them for you.”
Shout your flaws.
Disempower your flaws.
3. Don’t pay for accolades.
Did you know accolades are for sale?
They absolutely are.
For example, if you have $50,000 you can get an accolade which says you went to Stanford and brandish it all over your resume and LinkedIn profile … even though you really just bought a 5-day executive session they sell to anyone who can write the check. Do you want to be a New York Times bestseller? It’s for sale. According to Wikipedia, it costs about $200,000. Do you want your YouTube video to have a million views? Need your podcast to have a million downloads? It’s for sale. Absolutely for sale. As long as you don’t mind blasting people with ads and have a few hundred thousand dollars handy you can have it all!
Everyone knows money talks in our world today.
And if you want it, they’ll sell it to you.
Demand creates supply.
But here’s the thing about Mel: even though she has a crapload of videos that have gone viral with millions of views … she’s never paid for it. I can’t think of many others who can say this. She doesn’t feed Google or YouTube with endless thousands of dollars to prop up her ego and view counts.
Oh, and the New York Times bestseller tag? She doesn’t have it. Maybe she never will! But she doesn’t care. She’s too busy changing the world with her ideas to spend time and energy caring about whoever is busy counting how many books she sold in certain bookstores or whatever. She can’t be bothered.
In his 1974 Caltech Commencement speech Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.”
One problem with paying for accolades, of course, is you always know you paid for them. So if you embed a tiny little lie inside you that means you’re going to have to spit gloss that turd forever as you show it off to people or your cover’s completely blown.
You can do it if you want to, of course.
It’s just not a pleasant way to live.
What’s one solution?
Don’t pay for accolades.
2. Ambition is beautiful
Are you ambitious?
If so, do you admit it to yourself? Do you declare it about yourself or share it with others? Or is it one of those rougher-edged aspects of your personality that you sort of cover up or feel a bit embarrassed about … like I did for years?
One part of my story very quickly: My wife told me she didn’t love me anymore when I was 28 years old. We had been married two years. We had just bought a house. It broke my heart. I moved into a small downtown apartment. I was blogging till 3:00am every night. I had huge bags under my eyes. I had pounding headaches every day.
My worried mom suggested a therapist and helped me find one. When I met him we connected right away. I really liked the idea of spending an hour focused entirely on moving my thoughts forward. I had never done that! And one of the exercises my therapist had me do was begin to slowly articulate a series of words that I was looking for in platonic and romantic relationships. It took me the better part of a year to do it. With a lot of thought I found my four words: curious, creative, romantic, optimistic. I dated for a year but never quite clicked with anyone. And then I realized! There was a word missing. A word I had never even admitted to myself. What was it? Ambitious.
I was ambitious.
In my case, it would be a better fit if I was with someone ambitious. And today I am.
I’m not sure if growing up in the suburbs and going to a great public school with great teachers just meant that my ambition was never stoked. Nobody blew billows on it telling me I need to go to enrichment camps and write standardized tests to study internationally or whatever.
But ambition, if you got it, isn’t ugly. It’s beautiful. Finding a great partner is ambition. Raising wonderful children is ambition. Doing passionate work is ambition. Ambition helps us live our deepest and most intentional lives.
Mel Robbins may be the most ambitious person I know. There’s a reason she flew around giving 500 speeches in the past three years, is managing a team of 75 people, and is shooting a full new hour of television every single day.
She isn’t afraid of her ambition. She doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t apologize for it. She rides it, she corrals it, she wields it.
And the world benefits.
1. People want to hear what they don’t want to hear
We want to be our best.
We want to live our best lives.
But it’s hard to change. Very hard. Incredibly hard. We want to, though! It’s why Self-Help is the largest section in the bookstore and why straight-talking tough love books are at the top of the charts. It’s why /getmotivated is one of the world’s largest subreddits with over 15,000,000 members. It’s why I spend my time thinking and writing about how to improve my own life and why (I think) you spend time reading them.
We want to get better.
We want to live our best lives.
But to do that we often need to hear what we don’t want to hear. We have to be told to cut ties with the relative who’s negatively affected our family for years. We need to be pushed to quit the job with the abusive boss. We have to make a giant leap to leave the romantic relationship that’s making us feel worse about ourselves.
Why are there so few signals in this world helping us make those big decisions? Well, many reasons, but a big one is because most of our friends don’t have the courage to give us the tough love. There’s so much downside. They could hurt their relationship with us. We may reject them or get into a fight. Honesty and blunt feedback are in short supply.
Enter Mel Robbins.
She plays the role of the friend who loves you but who also will smack you over the head with what you should do. Time and time again, in the most velvet-hammery way possible, I’ve witnessed Mel give tough love to people who just need that push. Like here. Or here. Or here.
She’s done it for me, too.
When I’m sweating some random numbers (“number of followers”, “bestseller list rankings”, etc) she gives me a big verbal slap telling me I’m an artist who shouldn’t care. I should just make art. And that resonates with me … because she’s right, of course. And I move forward in my thinking.
The truth is people want to hear what they don’t want to hear.
Mel is just one of the bravest people telling us the truth.
I’m so proud of Mel.
We need her voice in the world right now.
And I can’t wait to hear it every single day.
Click “Find Your Station” on MelRobbinsShow.com to find her show in your city…
7 Ways To Reduce Cell Phone Addiction (With Step-By-Step Photos And Instructions)
I got an iPhone in 2009. It made my life better. Richer! More fulfilled. I was able to connect with friends outside of my house. I was able to read an article while waiting in line. I was able to answer questions from my restaurant chair.
Ten years later I’m a full fledged cell phone addict.
My thumbs hurt, my eyes are strained, and the hunch in my back is getting pointier. It’s gotten so bad I now ask my wife to hide my cell phone from me for evenings, days, or sometimes weeks at a time. (I did a two week stretch last summer and after a day of anxiety it was supreme bliss.)
Let me be as clear as I can.
Cell phone addiction is lowering resilience, increasing anxiety, and adding to our stress levels.
I have already written articles on 6 Ways To Reduce Cell Phone Addiction and 3 Ways To Fight Cellphone Addiction In Schools.
Today I’m going to get into brass tacks.
Here are seven tactical ways you can make your phone less addictive with the exact step-by-step photo-guided tour of doing each one. I made these for an iPhone because that’s what I have but most of these can be done on other phones as well.
7. Delete a social media app
Step 1: Gently push the button on a social media app (like Instagram) till it starts shaking in its boots
Step 2: Click the little x in the top left corner
6. Set up text replacement shortcuts
What’s one way to get off your cell phone? Spend less time texting on your cell phone. Text replacement shortcuts are tiny phrases you create which then pop into longer phrases that you use often.
Step 1: Click Settings
Step 2: Click General
Step 3: Click Keyboard
Step 4: Click Text Replacement
Step 5: Create Text Replacements. Samples include ad (insert your full mailing address), em (insert your email address), and even something specific to your job or industry such as dec (insert your standard paragraph to respectfully decline an invitation).
5. Turn your phone to black and white
According to National Eye Institute, when we turn our phones from color to black and white we make them less addictive. They look less like slot machines! And more like low-fi functional devices.
Step 1: Click Settings
Step 2: Click General
Step 3: Click Accessibility
Step 4: Click Display Accommodations
Step 5: Click Color Filters
Step 6: Turn Color Filters On and click Grayscale
PS. Too hardcore? If you like the idea of going black and white, but want to keep color handy for occasional use, then here’s a setting to help. Go Settings — Accessibility — Accessibility Shortcut — Color Filters. What’s that do? It lets you triple-click the side button on your phone to swap between settings. Pa-zam!
4. Download the Forest app
One of my favorite apps to help with cell phone addiction is Forest because it essentially closes down your phone whenever you want to create a nice block of productivity. It’s called Forest because a tiny seed growing into a sapling grows into a tree while you’re using the app. And if you start using your phone again? You kill the tree. This tiny bit of visual damage prevents you from cheating. And studies such as this one show alerts are impairing attention and even causing hyperactivity.
Step 1: Click App store
Step 2: Search for and download Forest App (it’s worth the $2.79)
Step 3: Open the Forest App
Step 4: Watch your forest grow!
3. Empty your tray
At the bottom of your cell phone screen there is a little tray of icons that stays there. For most people it’s probably their phone, email, browser, and messages. But when those icons are visible, on every screen, at all times, you’re more inclined to click them. And, of course, email and texts will wave at you with little number flags to grab your attention. So don’t let them!
Step 1: Hold down any apps you have in your tray
Step 2: Move those apps and empty your tray
[Pro-Tip: It’s also worth scrambling your phone icons around frequently to avoid automatic behaviors to open apps without thinking about them.]
2. Put your phone into “Do Not Disturb” mode
Our cell phones are designed to be push devices. They push alerts at us! Push texts at us! Push notifications at us! Push, push, push. And we’re the catcher at the backstop just taking all those hits. So flip the switch and turn your phone into a pull device. Keep your phone on Do Not Disturb (or Airplane Mode – the only difference is that you still receive alerts on Do Not Disturb, your phone just doesn't light up or make noise) and then flip off Do Not Disturb mode to momentarily handle your emails / messages.
Step 1: Swipe up on your iPhone and press that tiny “Moon” button.
1. Get a landline
Don’t laugh! I am serious. Think of a landline as a ticket away from your cellphone. Want to talk to someone far away? Landline does the job nicely. And since so few people have landlines the price has plummeted. Ours is less than $20 a month! Now we don’t feel pressure to sleep near our cell phones since family can call the landline in emergencies. (By the way, for an emergency inside your house the landline is hardwired to your address for 9-1-1 calls, speeding up emergency responses, unlike your cell phone.)
Step 1: Call your phone company
Step 2: Ask for a landline
Step 3: Tell them Neil sent you
So, that’s it! 7 tools in my attempt to beat the addiction.
What helps you?
Send me a note at neil@globalhappiness.org
You Need To Take More Vacation … And Here’s How To Do It
Mandatory vacation is the way of the future
Have you ever felt burned out after a vacation?
I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Disney World all week. I’m talking about how you knew, the whole time walking around Epcot, that a world of work was waiting for you upon your return.
Our vacation systems are completely broken.
They don’t work.
The classic corporate vacation system goes something like this: You get a set number of vacation days a year (often only two to three weeks), you fill out some 1996-era form to apply for time off, you get your boss’s signature, and then you file it with a team assistant or log it in some terrible database. It’s an admin headache. Then most people have to frantically cram extra work into the weeks before they leave for vacation in order to actually extract themselves from the office. By the time we finally turn on our out-of-office messages, we’re beyond stressed, and we know that we’ll have an even bigger pile of work waiting for us when we return.
What a nightmare.
For most of us, it’s hard to actually use vacation time to recharge.
So it’s no wonder that absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves, and stress leaves.
In the UK, the Department for Work and Pensions says that absenteeism costs the country’s economy more than £100 billion per year. A white paper published by the Workforce Institute and produced by Circadian, a workforce solutions company, calls absenteeism a bottom-line killer that costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year. It doesn’t help that, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the United States is the only country out of 21 wealthy countries that doesn’t require employers to offer paid vacation time. (Check out this world map on Wikipedia to see where your country stacks up. We love you, Enlightened Swedes!)
Now.
Let’s solve this problem.
First question is this big one.
Would it help if we got more paid vacation?
No, not necessarily.
According to a study from the U.S. Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm, just over 40% of Americans plan not to use all their paid time off anyway. It’s not the amount we’re given then, it’s the amount we’re taking, or feel able to take.
So what’s the progressive approach?
Is it the Netflix or Twitter policies that say take as much vacation as you want, whenever you want it? Open-ended, unlimited vacation sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? Very progressive, right? No, that approach is broken too.
What happens in practice with unlimited vacation time? Warrior mentality. Peer pressure. Social signals that say you’re a slacker if you’re not in the office. Mathias Meyer, the CEO of German tech company Travis CI, wrote a blog post about his company abandoning its unlimited vacation policy:
“When people are uncertain about how many days it’s okay to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.”
The point is that in unlimited vacation time systems, you probably won’t actually take a few weeks to travel through South America after your wedding, because there’s too much social pressure against going away for so long. Work objectives, goals, and deadlines are demanding. You look at your peers and see that nobody is backpacking through China this summer, so you don’t go either. You don’t want to let your team down, so your dream of visiting Machu Picchu sits on the shelf forever.
What’s the solution?
Recurring, scheduled mandatory vacation.
Yes, that’s right — an entirely new approach to managing vacation. And one that preliminary research shows works much more effectively.
Designer Stefan Sagmeister said in his TED talk, “The Power of Time Off,” that every seven years he takes one year off. He said:
“In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.”
He does warn that the sabbaticals take a lot of planning, and that you get the most benefit from them after you’ve worked for a significant amount of time.
Why does he do this? He says:
“Right now we spend about the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there are another 40 years that are really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years.”
As he says, that one year is the source of his creativity, inspiration, and ideas for the next seven years.
I wanted to test this theory so I collaborated with Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, a global aviation strategy firm of about 10 people, to ask a simple question:
“What if we force people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks?”
The idea was that this would be a microcosm of the Sagmeister principle of one year off every seven years. And it was entirely mandatory. In fact, we designed it so that if you contacted the office while you were on vacation — whether through email, WhatsApp, Slack, or anything else — you didn’t get paid for that vacation week. We tried to build in a financial punishment for working when you aren’t supposed to be working, in order to establish a norm about disconnecting from the office.
The system is designed so that you don’t get a say in when you go. Some may say that’s a downside, but for this experiment, we believed that putting a structure in place would be a significant benefit. The team and clients would know well ahead of time when someone would be taking a week off. And the point is you actually go. And everybody goes. So there are no questions, paperwork, or guilt involved with not being at the office.
With this 12 week experiment we had managers rate employee productivity, creativity, and happiness levels before and after the mandatory time off. (We used a five-point Likert scale, using simple statements such as “Ravi is demonstrating creativity in his work,” with the options ranging from one, Strongly Disagree, to five, Strongly Agree.)
And what did we find out?
Creativity went up 33%, happiness levels rose 25%, and productivity increased 13%. It’s a small sample, sure, but there’s a meaningful story here. When we dive deeper on creativity, the average employee score was 3.0 before time off and 4.0 after time off. For happiness, the average employee score was 3.2 before time off and 4.0 afterward. And for productivity, the average employee score was 3.2 before and rose to 3.6.
This complements the feedback we got from employees who, upon their return, wrote blog posts about their experiences with the process and what they did with their time. Many talked about how people finally found time to cross things off of their bucket lists — finally holding an art exhibition, learning a new language, or traveling somewhere they’d never been before.
Now, this is a small company, and we haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: Could something this simple work in your workplace? Are you the leader in charge of a team who could try this? Do you run a company where you want to give it a shot?
Let me share two pieces of constructive feedback that came back:
Frequency was too high. Employees found that once every seven weeks (while beautiful on paper) was just too frequent for a small company like SimpliFlying. Its competitive advantage is agility, and having staff take time off too often upset the work rhythm. Nigam proposed adjusting it to every twelve weeks. But with employee input, we redesigned it to once every eight weeks.
Staggering was important. Let’s say that two or three people work together on a project team. We found that it didn’t make sense for these people to take time off back-to-back. Batons get dropped if there are consecutive absences. We revised the arrangement so that no one can take a week off right after someone has just come back from one. The high-level design is important and needs to work for the business.
This is early research, but it confirms something we said at the beginning: Vacation systems are broken and aren’t actually doing what they’re advertised to do. If you show up drained after your vacation, that means you didn’t get the benefit of creating space.
Why is creating space so important?
Consider this quote from Tim Kreider, who wrote “The ‘Busy’ Trap” for the New York Times:
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
Vacations systems are broken.
But early results say that mandatory vacation could fix them.
Life is short so the earlier we get cracking the more time we’ll be spending doing better and more important work.
Check out the video version of this article below:
An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review
The Single Principle You Must Practice When Feeling Overwhelmed or Burned Out
Years ago I got divorced and went from married suburbanite to urban bachelor in the span of a few weeks. Talk about a bumpy landing. I didn’t have any friends, family, or social support downtown, so it took me time to develop a new two-word philosophy to rattle myself out of the wallowing.
What was the two-word philosophy?
Say yes.
To anything, anytime, with anyone. Say yes. Simple as that.
I don’t regret that philosophy. It brought me opportunities and human connections that I would have never had otherwise. But for everything I gained, I also paid the price on productivity. The more you’re given a chance to do, and then actually do, of course the less time you have to do it all.
So this article shares how I knew it was time to rein it in and the method I use to keep everything in balance today. It’s a great principle if you’re struggling with any form of overwhelm, burnout, or just feeling like there’s always too much to do.
THE (LIMITED) VIRTUES OF “YES”
Defaulting to yes actually worked well for me in those first few years.
I went to charity events for organizations I’d never heard of before, I was the guy at the concert who doesn’t know the songs but buys the album anyway, and I often had some random internet friend crashing on my couch.
Of course, I also had lots of nights that didn’t end well. Stutter stops, terrible blind dates, cold lonely walks home from some get-together that didn’t go anywhere. But I also said yes to doing a TED Talk that became one of the world’s most inspiring and said yes to writing a bunch of short blog posts for myself which ultimately turned into The Book of Awesome and sold a million copies.
And then, over time, I suddenly had more options, more choices, and more invitations than I could possibly accept. This transition happens to many of us. You go from parent of one kid to parent of three. You say yes to the community board and suddenly three more boards ask you to join. You score a promotion at work and then inherit a big team of 10 people to manage.
You look back and realize that you said yes to more—more meetings, more opportunities, more challenges. Your life accelerated. But then you hit a point where you suddenly have too much to do.
Welcome to the World of Overwhelm.
Now what?
“HELL YEAH!” VERSUS EVERYTHING ELSE
My friend Derek Sivers has a great philosophy that I’ve adopted and want to share with you. It’s called, “No or hell yeah!” and it’s really quite simple. Here’s how it works: You receive an invitation to do something (a date, a job, a social event, whatever), then take a minute to observe your authentic reaction—which is invariably either one of two things:
A super emphatic, fist-pumping, “Hell yeah!” where you’re just shaking with excitement to do it—in which case you do it, or
Literally anything else at all—in which case you don’t.
The beauty of this model is that it filters every other positive reaction into a no: “Um, sounds good!”, “Lemme check my calendar, I think I’m open,” or the dreaded, “Can I get back to you?”
No, no, all no!
Those are lukewarm reactions that remain positive until just before you get to the commitment and realize you wish you’d said no instead. Maybe you even bail last-minute, which destroys trust and hurts your reputation. It’s much easier to simply filter your options through the “No or Hell Yeah” model up front, to make sure you’re only committing to things you really want to do.
GREAT IS THE ENEMY OF LIFE CHANGING
What’s the benefit?
You don’t kill those invisible opportunities you haven’t dreamt up yet—those big projects you need time to dive into, and all the downtime your mind needs to create space for what matters.
I knew it was time to switch from “say yes” to “no or hell yeah!” when I looked at my calendar and realized I was swamped, morning to night, on things I really enjoyed doing but—and here’s the crucial part—only some of which I loved so much as to call life changing. If “good” is the enemy of great, then “great” is the enemy of “life changing.”
Why does it need to be life changing? Simple. Life is short. We have on average 30,000 days here total. It’s over in a blink! There are already loads of options and obligations you simply can’t say no to because they’re part of your work or family responsibilities. And that’s fine. But that often leaves precious little room for your personal and social commitments, which makes it all the more important to set a really high bar for those. When you do, you’ll free up time to focus on what you care deeply about. And the benefit of doing that will start leaking into your work and family life, too.
Now, I’ll be honest. Though it sounds great on paper, making this transition wasn’t easy for me. It was actually downright painful. And it continues to be. It’s not just saying no to a lunch meeting so you can write a book chapter. That’s the easy stuff! It also includes missing a family dinner because I’m off interviewing David Sedaris for my podcast. These hurt—deeply. It’s incredibly hard saying no to friends, fun projects, and fly-away ideas. Plus, sometimes you find yourself just staring in horror as a brand-new relationship you know would take off if you had time to put into it just sputters and dies because of zero water or sunlight.
No need to pretend that’s easy. It’s frankly a horrible feeling.
But the alternative?
Well, those giant regrets haunting you later in life—that maybe you could’ve tackled your dream job, that perhaps you should’ve done something that felt more meaningful—those are harder to brush away than any obligations cluttering your calendar next week or next month. Because plotted on a long enough timeline saying yes to everything doesn’t just tank your productivity, it also eats away at your sense of purpose.
And that’s actually pretty easy to say no to, don’t you think?
An earlier version of this article appeared in Fast Company