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This year has been one of the most important, yet challenging years of my life. And as we’ll see, that might not be a coincidence. As you probably know, I’ve been calling out some of the shady dealings and worst practices of the self-help industry for my entire career. Whether it’s slimy sales tactics, unrealistic and unscientific advice, or promising results that simply aren’t possible, I’ve dedicated much of my adult life to “cleaning up” this space as much as possible. You could even say that I have come to see this as my purpose, my calling in life. About a year ago, a number of people I know started asking me about using ChatGPT as a therapist or life coach. Turns out, millions of people were doing this. I was intrigued, so I tried it out. The results were… mixed. Very mixed. On the one hand, AI has access to all of the known psychological research, is trained on thousands of hours of clinical transcripts and possesses pretty much all of human knowledge within it. On the other hand, it often has no clue how to use it. ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me …
What is your biggest fear? What would it mean if you could overcome that fear, once and for all? In this article, I'm going to help you do exactly that by teaching you five tactics to conquer anything you might be afraid of. Heights, spiders, small spaces, strangely-shaped clouds—whatever makes your knees turn to water and keeps you up at night. These five tactics are universal and proven. In fact, last year I used them to help two readers who were afraid of driving overcome their fear over a single weekend, then shared the results on my YouTube channel. https://youtu.be/pZXzLN2miq8?si=AZgbNR_VVyvcnCY5 Ready for those five tactics? Let's hear them. Exposure therapy. (2024). In Wikipedia. Exposure therapy is exactly what it says. You take something you're afraid of and gradually expose yourself to it, first in small doses, then in larger doses, until finally you become desensitized to the experience. If you're afraid of heights, you don't want to start at the top of the Eiffel Tower. You want to start on a second-floor balcony and work your way up until …
Today is my 40th birthday. When I turned 30 a decade ago, I wrote an article sharing life lessons to survive your 20s and crowd-sourced advice on how to excel in your 30s. And apparently you guys loved it. So, here's more of the good stuff: 40 life lessons I now know at 40 that I wish I knew at 20. Dig in. If you treat yourself with dignity and respect, then you will only tolerate others who treat you with dignity and respect. Get right with yourself, get right with the world. Success and failure are fuzzy concepts that only exist in your mind before you do something. Not after. After the fact, everything will be a mixture of both. The only real …
I've read over 1,000 nonfiction books in my life, and these 33 are the most powerful of them all. I can honestly say they changed my life, who's to say they won't change yours too? Don't just take my word for it though. Read on for my summary of all 33 books and see for yourself how your next read might just change your life. https://youtu.be/7kwqWgXzHvc This might be the most practical book ever written on simple behavioral change. Atomic Habits has three big takeaways. The first is that small lifestyle changes compound over a long period of time. So you don't want to try to be a completely different person tomorrow, you want to be 1% better 100 days in a row. The second big takeaway can be summarized with the line, "We don't rise to the level of our goals, but we fall to the level of our systems." The idea here is that it's not about ambition or effort, it's about creating an environment that makes behavioral change inevitable. And finally, the third takeaway is that habits don't stick unless we alter our identities. That means it's …
Every day, hundreds of millions of people suffer from giving too many fucks. They spend their lives imprisoned by meaningless anxiety and unnecessary concerns. But it doesn't have to be that way. In this article, I'm going to walk you through the five levels of non-fuck-giving, each level demonstrating more non-fuckery than the last. You will learn step by step how to face your fears, how to stop worrying what other people think, and how to achieve the eternal bliss of a fuckless life. Strap in, it's time to stop giving fucks and start living. https://youtu.be/zhjuqTGMaAs?si=BBYLnwI07pU6C_HF Think back to the last time you got a terrible haircut. Chances are you walked around all day assuming that everybody was staring at that tragedy of a mop on your head. But the reality was most people didn't notice. And if they noticed, they sure didn't care. One of my favorite quotes ever comes from the author David Foster Wallace. He said: You will stop worrying so …
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My move from fractional work to full-time employment!
After a two-year absence from running a digital publication, namely Minimalissimo, I’m returning with a new project. Just when I thought I was out... Okay, no Pacino impressions. I definitely needed that break from curation and probably also from the constraints of minimalism for that matter. Over the past few years I’ve focused a lot on making digital tools and the odd experimental physical object. The latter still interests me hugely, and I’m casually working on a design for FFF, which I’ll cover in greater detail another time. Yet I became pretty disillusioned with the former: digital tooling in the age of AI. The sheer pace of development, replicas, slop, and hype just killed my enthusiasm for building. And I thought, “What do I actually enjoy doing?” The short and simple answer to that was “curation”. The longer and more complex answer is building a respectable publication that features journalistic deep dives, meaningful conversations, and tasteful curation. All presented and exhibited in a way that makes you appreciate the web experience over any social media feed or RSS reader. My new project is called MOUTHPRINT, which I’m building with my cofounder George Kroustallis, aka Minorstep. Together, our approach is to look closely at visual culture across art, fashion, and product design, tracing the people, processes, and choices behind the work. We’ll be publishing case files, which might sound a bit odd, but what the hell. These will examine individual projects through research and conversations with the people behind them. Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging and recording the many people who contributed to these projects and helped shape them. Alongside that, we’ll be publishing exhibitions that bring works together around a theme, making connections across disciplines and time. I’m under no illusions about how difficult it is to build a publication from the ground up. We’re totally up against it, but the web is a big place, we’re locked in, and we want to be heard. I’d now like to invite you to subscribe to our newsletter for the latest developments ahead of our official launch. We’d love to have you along for the ride. → mouthprint.com
Measuring output and time spent is easy, while measuring efficiency and effectiveness is hard. Here's why trusting your engineers beats tracking their productivity.
The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease already exists. We just have to be brave enough to use it.
