Are You Missing Out? How To Handle The Double-Edged Sword of Social Media
A pic of someone posing on a sunny beach, fervent opinions on the presidential election, updates on wedding prep, kiddies looking adorable — just a typical glance at my Facebook feed. ON THE ONE HAND There’s so much that’s good about social media: It updates us on the lives of people that we care about but might otherwise not keep in close touch with, creates community and provides an easy forum for self-expression. In the aftermath of hurricanes and other ...
How To Make Reality Catch Up Faster
In the late 1970s, Jim Fannin was coaching Adriano Panatta, one of the top-ranked tennis players in the world and a former French Open champion. He tells the story of Panatta’s quarterfinal match with one of the newcomers at an ATP tournament. “As the match unfolded, this low-ranked, left-handed, red-headed jerk of a guy has no respect for a top-ranked player in the world. He stalls. He berates an umpire. He yells at a ball kid. He crushes my player! We ...
What Is Flow Anyway?
You know that feeling when you’re so fully immersed in an activity — an engrossing conversation, say, or a riveting mystery novel, a challenging game of tennis — that you lose track of time, your self-consciousness falls away and life seems effortless? That’s being in the flow. It’s a phenomenon that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor and former chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, has spent over 20 years researching and views as the key to enhancing the ...
Why Not Sleep While You’re Still Alive
“Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.” – Arthur Schopenhauer Here, in New York, where there’s a bravado culture — especially among lawyers and investment bankers — of who can survive on the least sleep, I’ve always felt a bit wimpy because I’ve always made sleep a priority ...
Five Habits of Happy High-Achievers
When Shannon Bahrke won bronze in women’s moguls at the 2010 Winter Olympics, in her excitement she “hugged first-place winner Hannah Kearney so tightly that she almost knocked her U.S. teammate over.” Next to them on the podium, however, Canadian skier Jennifer Heil looked crestfallen after taking silver. From our vantage point as a spectator, it might be hard to imagine feeling disappointed at “only” winning a silver medal. On the other hand, we can kind of understand how, after ...
How To Enjoy The Job You Have Until You Have The Job You Want
Visit a bookstore and you can find any number of books telling you how to find your dream job (a “dream job” search on Amazon returns 513 results), from using the Internet to using the rules of dating. Clearly, there is a large number of people who do not have their dream job and want help finding it. For most of them, however, the transition will not happen overnight, and what those books don’t share is how to enjoy the ...
