I don’t pay much attention to my investment portfolio, but I watch my meaning portfolio like a hawk. A meaning portfolio is your collection of “meaning assets” – the reasons you get out of bed in the morning. They are the sources from which you derive your sense of purpose, fulfillment, self-worth, and ultimately, happiness….
About a decade ago, I came across a video on YouTube that profoundly shaped my view of how culture works. Everything Is A Remix by documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson argues that all new creative works are built from preexisting ones in an endless process of what he calls “remixing.” From music to movies to video…
For years I’ve heard about a phenomenon called intergenerational trauma – the idea that the impact of traumatic events can be passed down from one generation to the next. I have to admit I never believed it was a real thing. I had only heard about it in very woo-woo circles in San Francisco, and…
(While Having Our First Child During a Global Pandemic) Writing and publishing my book Building a Second Brain was by far the longest and hardest project I’ve ever completed. From the first call with the agent (who would eventually represent me) in January 2019 until June 2022 when the book was released to the world,…
Michael Singer’s thinking and writing have provoked four fundamental mindset shifts in my life. First, I began to view everything as information. I was already biased toward this view with my work, but reading The Untethered Soul helped me apply it not just to quotes from books or academic papers, but to all the data
Imagine that one day you notice a thorn in your side.
You may not even know how it got there. But it hurts quite a bit every time something touches it. You decide to build a “pain protection machine” to mitigate the pain. It is a metal exoskeleton that wraps your torso in titanium
As I approached the town of Alachua, I started looking for the site of the Temple.
I half expected a towering spire to appear along the highway, but there wasn’t one. Then I expected to see a billboard along the two-lane highway threading its way through the backcountry, but there was nothing.
One book has impacted me more than any other over the past 10 years: The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.
I first read it in 2014 about a year after becoming self-employed. The first rush of excitement at my newfound freedom had waned, and I was beginning to feel the turbulence of the uncertain freelance
One of the most important milestones for a born-again Christian is to tell your “testimony.” A testimony is your personal story of how you came to the faith. It often includes the problems or challenges you were facing in your life at the time, how lost or confused you felt, the person or experience that…
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Every fad diet and nutrition philosophy has one problem in common: they all ask you to mistrust the signals coming from your body, and to instead place your trust in an external authority. Even if the diet succeeds, you’ve…
I often find that life teaches me the same lesson across multiple areas of my life at the same time. All I have to do is sit back and notice what it’s trying to tell me (and take some notes). That is happening right now with the idea that “Everything is a season.” It’s not…
By Praxis Fellow Christina Luo Productivity is about managing emotions as much as projects. Yet we often focus on productivity as a toolset more than a mindset. Our proximity to an abundance of information makes us think we’re making progress when we’re merely deciding how to react to stimuli. The means of note-taking, task-making, and…