The Counterintuitive Way To Get Better At Anything
while back, I posted about David Epstein’s new book, which breaks down how constraints can help us live better lives. Ironically, making things a little harder can lead to increased productivity, creativity, and happiness. This resonated with a lot of readers, but many were understandably hesitant to deliberately make their lives more difficult. (Apparently, this was a task that, up to this point, the world had handled for them just fine.) So the most common reply I got was:…
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This Is How To Be An Emotionally Intelligent Parent: 4 Secrets
u’re trying to calmly explain to your toddler why they can’t have ice cream right now. What’s that? They’ve just burst into tears? Oh, lovely. You thought you were merely discussing the appropriate timing of nutrition, but in fact, you’ve just triggered a Category 5 meltdown over the fundamental unfairness of the universe. And I’m talking pure fury here. The kind of rage you only see in an 80’s action movie when the hero’s partner gets killed. Anger for a…
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How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 7 Secrets From Research
ying to connect with people can feel like trying to put a USB stick into a port: there’s a 90% chance you’ll get it wrong three times, even though there are only two possible ways it can go in. But relationships matter. Like, life-and-death matter. As I wrote about in my second book: the size and quality of your relationships either equals or exceeds almost all the other factors in determining your mortality. So, yes, to live longer, you must…
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This Is How To Be An Awesome Parent: 5 Expert Insights
renting small children can be a Sisyphean grind, except Sisyphus is half your size, naked, and screaming for you to carry the boulder up the hill for him. Getting little kids to do even the simplest of things can be near impossible. You think you’d have the advantage, right? You’re the adult. You’ve got years of experience, a bigger vocabulary, and actual logic. But no. You’re not just battling their stubbornness; you’re dealing with the chaotic energy of someone who…
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This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life: 11 Secrets From Research
e sheer volume of pseudoscientific drivel available on the subject of “getting in shape” is so dense, it could collapse in on itself and form a black hole of misinformation. We are living in a hellish fitness funhouse where every corner is lined with smug, glistening torsos barking contradictory advice. It's like every gym bro and spiritual moon-juice peddler formed a consortium dedicated to ensuring no two people on Earth can agree on the basic act of moving one’s body.…
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This Is How To Have A Resilient Family: 13 Secrets From Research
you’ve never been in a family crisis, congratulations. You are either: an orphan, lying, due. And by crisis, I mean full-on, real-deal adversity. Divorce, grief, bankruptcy, etc. The life-wrecking, soul-scraping, “somebody go ahead and unplug me because I cannot” kind of crisis. You’re trying to cobble together some kind of Norman Rockwell-with-an-iPad situation while it feels like the world is burning. Just doing anything you can so your therapist doesn’t write “escalating” in the margins of your file. Life…
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This Is How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 7 Secrets
need to connect deeply to have good relationships. To build trust. To reduce conflict. To influence others and help them make positive change. But to be emotionally understood by someone else -- or the reverse -- isn’t just uncommon. It’s practically arcane, like alchemy or finding good tomatoes out of season. It’s rarer than a humble influencer. We try, but often we’re like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. Wah-wah-wah. What’s truly maddening is that this entire ordeal is…
10 minutes
New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Make Your Teenager Motivated
ying to motivate a teenager is like trying to push a boulder up a hill, except the boulder has a phone and keeps telling you that it will roll itself up the hill later, just give it a minute. So you remind them. They need to do their homework or their chores. This will get you The Teenage Sigh. This is no ordinary sigh. This is a long, theatrical exhale so weighty it could be used to measure atmospheric pressure.…
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