A number of weeks ago, I wrote the first post on hacking my own happiness. I participated in a study conducted at Harvard, and the result was a bunch of data collected from real-life about what made me happy. In the last article, I took a super-high-level look at the...

Dear my generation:   What gives? Where did all the love go? Are we too pragmatic, too jaded? Or are we more aware of the real workings of the world? How can we possibly reconcile the romantic tales still embodied in our media but absent from our lives? Are we...

I’ve received a few requests for this post, so here it is: my approach to focus. It is not an end-all be-all solution for everybody, but rather a look at the key underlying ways you can keep yourself moving towards a task. The tricks here should work well for anybody,...

Regardless of if you’re hanging out with friends or running a business, you will need to make a request of your peers sooner or later. On one hand, you need to get something out of the request. On the other hand, you don’t want to be that guy.   This...

Normally when a celebrity passes away I consider the event tragic – but no more so than any other of the human deaths that happen every day. I generally have a somewhat callous attitude toward our celebrity-driven worldwide culture.   Yet I found myself profoundly moved by the passing of...

Malcolm Gladwell uses the term “Outliers” to describe people who are exceptional in some way. His point is well made, but at the end of the day we tend to forget that outliers are people who are different. Strange. Weird.     To have unusual success, you need to be...

How many times have you put off starting something? How many times did that same task end up being relatively easy, once you finally got started?   In chemistry, activation energy is the “minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction.” What is fascinating about the concept is that this...

A while back, I made the statement that spontaneity is wanting what you get. Recently I had another adventure which has caused me to append to this statement: spontaneity is also knowing how to spot an opportunity.   Too often, we are paralyzed by the fear of the unknown. When...

When it comes to safety, appearances are much more important than fact. Thieves choose their victims based upon who looks like and easy mark.   I just landed in Lima, Peru last night and at no point did I feel at risk. Yet, many people warned me on my way...

No matter where I go in the world, I always know that sanity is just a plane flight away.   I tell people that I meet that I do not really have a “home” and that I move countries every 2-3 months. While this is true, if you look at...