Articles on Living Your Best Life
Read my mildly inspiring ideas on passion & purpose, creative expression, productivity, personal excellence, and self mastery.
While there’s nothing wrong with a stable 9-5 job, it can sometimes feel stifling, especially if your heart isn’t fully into it.
Therefore, if you have a passion, like making music, starting a business, or even a new career path entirely — the first step is to muster up the courage to and pursue it. As David Sarokin once wrote, “Passion is what gives you boundless energy, intense almost single-minded focus, and the willpower to overcome even the most daunting obstacles. You can take steps to define your own passion and put work in building your career or business.”
Of course, the journey will not be easy. But you can make the time to prepare for it, even if you’re working full time.
Here are some places to start:
I knew something was wrong the moment she answered.
“Your father had a stroke,” my mother explained. “He’s in the hospital now. The doctors are trying to find out more.”
The memory of my grandfather rushed to mind — a man I’d only ever known to be in a wheelchair from a stroke he’d had years before I was born. We used to watch Wonder Woman and eat popsicles together. He’d get pissed because I thought it was funny to hold the popsicle just out of his reach. It was a dick move, even for a four-year-old, and the sudden image of him reminded me just how helpless he could feel at times. It made me wonder if my father would suffer as he did.
Three days later, my wife received a similar call.
“I’m going to the hospital,” her mother explained. “I’m not feeling well, and I think there’s something wrong with my heart.”
As it turned out, my mother-in-law had…
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While there’s nothing wrong with a stable 9-5 job, it can sometimes feel stifling, especially if your heart isn’t fully into it.
Therefore, if you have a passion, like making music, starting a business, or even a new career path entirely — the first step is to muster up the courage to and pursue it. As David Sarokin once wrote, “Passion is what gives you boundless energy, intense almost single-minded focus, and the willpower to overcome even the most daunting obstacles. You can take steps to define your own passion and put work in building your career or business.”
Of course, the journey will not be easy. But you can make the time to prepare for it, even if you’re working full time.
Here are some places to start:
I started strong.
I got up at 5:40, meditated, planned my day, got the kids off to school, exercised, and was ready before 8 am.
This rarely happens, but when it does, my day goes well.
Just not this day.
I knew something was wrong the moment she answered.
“Your father had a stroke,” my mother explained. “He’s in the hospital now. The doctors are trying to find out more.”
The memory of my grandfather rushed to mind — a man I’d only ever known to be in a wheelchair from a stroke he’d had years before I was born. We used to watch Wonder Woman and eat popsicles together. He’d get pissed because I thought it was funny to hold the popsicle just out of his reach. It was a dick move, even for a four-year-old, and the sudden image of him reminded me just how helpless he could feel at times. It made me wonder if my father would suffer as he did.
Three days later, my wife received a similar call.
“I’m going to the hospital,” her mother explained. “I’m not feeling well, and I think there’s something wrong with my heart.”
As it turned out, my mother-in-law had…
By the end of this article, I’m going to give you a digital version of a yearly planner for free. One I’ve spent the last decade refining and tweaking and tailoring based on a 360 degree, science-backed productivity system focused on improving all seven important aspects of my life.
It’s been so powerful for me that I wrote a book about it, have written countless articles about it (this being yet another), and have spent the last few years meticulously drawing out every month, week, and day in my paper notebook with a ruler and pen.
Why it’s so powerful is the purpose of this article. And it comes down to these seven essential elements:
Entrepreneurship is a tough game. Even with starting out small, you face a unique set of obstacles as a business owner — but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try beating these challenges. So with that in mind, below are several tips on how to overcome the challenge of owning a small business.
The legend of the koi isn’t well know.
As it’s told, a school of koi swam upstream through China’s Yellow River. They worked together, against the current, until they came upon a waterfall called the Dragon Gate.
Upon seeing the obstacle, many koi turned away, unwilling to tackle the challenge. The rest remained, jumping with all their might in an attempt to reach the river above.
But their efforts brought more struggle.
There are three ways to live your life.
The first is to follow your interests, becoming a jack of all trades but master of none.
If you walk this path, your bookshelf may look like a public library. You’ll find almost any conversation interesting, especially one in which you’re taught something new. You may consider yourself an amateur photographer, and chess player, and writer pencil, and chef, and weightlifter, and... you get the idea. It’s not that you don’t have a specialty, you just love learning about all the world has to offer.
The second way is to…
There is work, and there are results.
The two go hand-in-hand.
Can I tell you something?
I took the day off to home school my kids and I'm about ready to pull my fucking hair out.
Not because of my kids.
They're troopers. They're working hard. They're dealing with this shitty #covid19 hand better than many adults.
No, I was frustrated because I didn't know how long each assignment would take, didn't know when they'd get tired, and had no idea how to move them through their planned education. As such, we failed a math test, spent twice as long as we should have on history, and I missed feeding them all lunch.
Tonight, I'm recommending my wife to sainthood.
Now, with a bit of perspective, I see exactly what went wrong.
I had a plan, but I didn't have a schedule.
Pain shot through my back.
Shocking, excruciating pain. The kind that takes your breath away.
It started mid-spine and radiated outward, wrapping around my ribs, then upward toward my neck.
I gasped for air, dropped my dumbbells, and collapsed to the ground.
It felt oddly good to lie there on the cold concrete of my basement exercise room. If I stayed still, I could regroup and take account of what happened. But the slightest twitch brought immediate suffering.
Even breathing hurt.
Had I warmed up before working out, I could have avoided twisting my back muscles into a tangled hammock. But I dove right in, curling heavy weights completely cold.
Over the next two weeks while my back muscles healed, I’d live to regret it.
Moving as deliberately as I’ve ever moved in my life, I attempted to get up. And, with every painful move, I could hear my trainers’ voice in my head: “You’re old as fuck bruh. You gotta spend the time getting your muscles ready so you don’t hurt yourself.”
Lesson learned.
I’ve got a message for the pissed-off suburbanite who posted an emotionally charged and personally-identifying Facebook story about a terrible person speeding through our neighborhood with reckless abandon.
You are the problem. You.
Not the person who was allegedly going 15 over in a school zone.
No.
If what you say is true, a local cop should serve that someone a ticket as punishment for their mistake and to pump a bit of funding into our sheriff’s coffers.
But that so-and-so was speeding, probably like you have too. It’s just that you happened to eat an extra bowl of bitch-flakes this morning, giving you some holier-than-thou complex that made you the judge, jury, and executioner.
So congratulations. You win the Internet shaming award. And you, being the problem, should change your ways.
Oh, and while you’re at it, take down that picture of their vehicle, or at least blur out their license plate.
You’re acting like a two-year-old, and shaming doesn’t work.
Here’s why.
It’s a terrible feeling.
Being exhausted from a day of constant activity but without a sense of accomplishment.
You move from task to task, keeping busy, but never really making progress.
As if exhaustion weren’t enough, overwhelm hovers overhead. Even when you finish a task. Even after you head home for the night.
That overwhelm is the last thing you think of before falling to sleep.
It’s the first thing you think of upon waking.
It just might be the biggest source of stress in your life.
You’ve tried many life hacks and productivity tips. Like aspirin, they offer some temporary relief. But this sense of overwhelm isn’t a minor headache; it’s a goddamn knife in your brain that leaves you constantly wondering how you’re going to get it all done, or whether you’ll ever get ahead.
It’s time you took the knife out and felt a sense of relief.
If I asked you which country was the most productive in the world, what would you say?
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Japan? America?
⠀
Those were my answers, but they’re not even in the top 5.
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Every year, Expert Markets study the productivity of countries around the globe. Their measurement stick, however, isn’t hours worked per week.
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Rather, they calculate hours worked divided into income generated toward the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, how much dough the average citizen earns per hour of effort.
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Which makes sense.
When Medium curators distributed my article into the Productivity category, and when a publication called The Startup distributed that same article to over 500k subscribers, it reinforced my belief that Jon Morrow is the worlds top blogging expert.
If you don't know of Jon Morrow, he's the founder and chief writer on SmartBlogger.com, and he's wildly successful.
I read pretty much anything Jon Morrow writes, and buy pretty much anything he has to sell. Jon has proven to me, through countless blogs and paid courses, that he's the real deal.
His writing is spot on, his advice is practical and immediately useful, and he seems to know every pain point a writer like me faces in running a writing-based business.
So when he offered his Write a Kick-Ass Blog Post writing challenge in which he and his staff of pro bloggers would walk challengers through writing an article in one week for—get this—$10, purchasing it was a no-brainer.
Over 600 others thought the same.
We set out on a journey to write a list-post from scratch in 7 days. Every step of the way—from idea to outline to introduction to content to closing—Jon and his team read our work and gave us invaluable feedback.
Here are some of the best things I learned.
In 1905, Albert Einstein showed us that time, energy, mass, and speed are intertwined.
The faster you move, the more energy you need.
The faster you move, the slower time passes for you.
The faster you move, the more your mass increases.
Reaching maximum speed, the speed of light, would require an infinite amount of energy and would mind-bogglingly, for you, bring time to a halt.
His formula, E=mc^2 mathematically describes how these principles apply to our physical world. But the concepts ring true for our daily life too.
Bust your ass too hard, and you’ll fall into bed exhausted.
Bust your ass for too long, and seconds will feel like minutes.
Bust your ass for too hard and too long, and you’ll feel as though you need an infinite amount of energy to go on. The “weight” of your work will become unbearable. You’ll burn out, falling to ground zero (or below).
You don’t think of Einstein’s equation while at work, but you feel the ramifications of overdoing it. You know deep down which tasks suck your energy and which tasks recharge it. And you instinctively know when it’s time to call it a day.
As it turns out, these feelings are key to maintaining the intricate balance between Einsteins four variables—time, speed, mass, and energy—which in turn is the key to becoming maximally productive.
It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?
The constant hustle. The endless grind. The relentless push to overachieve.
Every other social media post seems to have some self-improvement quote floating over a well-dressed celebrity, hustle-guilting you into working harder.
They tell us to never stop, never surrender.
They tell us to wake up at 5 am, exercise, side-hustle for a few hours, then put in a full workday and side-some hustle some more before hitting the sack.
They finally got three outs.
After 45 minutes of disappointing hit after hit, the opponents’ pitcher finally ended the inning by picking off our third base runner.
The runner wasn’t upset.
Our team of 10 and 11-year-old boys had scored an impressive 15 runs in the bottom of the third inning completely dominating the opponent and going on to win by eight points.
Two things about this score were surprising:
One, we lost against the same team in a walk-off hit just an hour earlier.
And two, out of seventeen plays that inning, only one was a home run.
You are only as productive as your environment. So let’s get your main work environment, your office, as productive as possible.
Here are 19 tiny changes (with affiliate links to products that I’ve personally used to enhance my productivity) that can do exactly that. Try one, or try them all. The more changes, the more you’ll find you have the clarity, focus, time, and energy to work on what matters.
Maybe it was just because it was Monday.
Maybe my weekend was too hectic.
Maybe it was because my kid woke me up three times: once to complain that he couldn’t sleep, once to tell me his stomach hurt, and another to puke.
Whatever it was, I stumbled out of bed feeling like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich marinated in a bag of Nickelodeon gak, trampled by a herd of bison, and left out in the sun to dry.
A glance at my calendar told me that I had more meetings than a millipede has legs giving me one and only one time to exercise, one and only one time to write an article, and zero times to take a seven-hour nap (which is the only thing I was contemplating doing).
Today was gearing up to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
Everything you do, or experience, or think is affected by the expectations you already have.
Take your arms, for example.
With both arms intact, your brain works swimmingly. It sends signals to your limbs, they move, they provide feedback, and your brain breathes a sigh of relief that the cycle is complete. When you expect your arm to move and it does, your expectations are fulfilled. All is well.
But if one arm were missing, this feedback loop doesn’t close. A variety of sensations, including pain, can follow.
In a fascinating book Phantoms in the Brain, Dr. Ramachandran explores the world of neuroscience through people who have lost a limb. Patients experienced phantom sensations in an extremity that no longer existed; some as simple as a fleeting tickle, others as irritating as an un-itchable itch and, in the worst of cases, pain.
The patient’s brain, having sent a signal to the missing limb, would expect a response. Without receiving one, its neural pathways would get confused, causing severe phantom pain where none should be possible.
Ouch.
Or take relationships, for example.
Camping can be a wonderful experience. Not only is it a great way to spend time, but it can actually make you more productive.
There are numerous great benefits to spending time outdoors. Here we look at 11 ways how camping will help your productivity in the office, at home, and in life.
You are a block of stone.
Chipped and cracked and carved by life.
Molded since birth, you now embody a unique shape, reflecting all that you’ve become.
Your parents were the first to sculpt you. Using the only tools they knew how. Tools given to them by generations of parents before them, they whittled you into the shape they wanted, or needed, or were proud of. A sculpture of sorts.
What he said to me was, “You’re such a nice guy, Mike. The nicest.”
What he meant was, “Everyone is trampling all over you. You’re not aggressive enough. You’re never going to get anywhere in life, and you certainly aren’t going to find success in this company.”
I’ve heard it a thousand times before.
“Mike, you’re such a nice guy.”
or
“Mike, you’re the nicest. So nice.”
Which would be great if it were a compliment. But it’s not.
Of course, there’s truth to what they say. I am nice. I do treat others with kindness. I would give you the shirt of my back if you needed it.
But their so called compliments are laced with an undercurrent of misgiving concerning my ability to get ahead in life or, at the very least, avoid the wrath of distrustful, self-interested sinners who would rob me of my possessions, my honor, and my virtue.
These stabs at my character disguised as flattery are enough to make me wonder if I should be more of an asshole.
Nice guys finish last, right
Sorry, this post isn’t for you.
It’s for me.
It’s for me internalize the mindset of a big-screen hero, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Someone who, though I’ve never met, I respect and admire.
It’s for me to capture the thinking of a giant who has been kicked around, ignored, laughed at, and ridiculed only to bust through to success in endeavor after endeavor.
It’s for me to embed an absolute can-do, break -through-walls, leap-over-obstacles kind of attitude into my psyche.
This post isn’t for you. It’s for me. But you can read it anyway :-).
In fact, I’d love everyone read these ideas and watch the video at the end.
I want everyone to hear Dwayne Johnson’s heartfelt words and catch a glimpse of how this success-genius made his way through failures from poverty to continual and lasting success.
Because unlike so many other successful people who share what they’re doing today to be successful, he talks about the mindset he fostered in the past that led him to his present and will help him grow and win big in the future.
It’s a fact.
Waking early is NOT correlated with success.
The proof is in the research.
According to the Huffington Post, “nearly 50% of self-made millionaires wake up at least three hours before their workday actually begins.” [1]
Okay, that’s not a lot of research, but read that quote again if you need to. While it suggests rising early contributes to success in a matter-of-fact tone, less than half of self-made millionaires are early birds. Which means the other half aren’t.
This article goes on to list a dozen or so wildly successful business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs who wake up before the crack of dawn, as if this is correlated to their success.
It’s not the only one.
Self-improvement gurus publish dozens of listicles daily on the benefits of rising before dawn. Success experts scream of the benefits of an early start. We even hear of historical figures like George Washington who “the sun never caught in bed.”
All this pressure to set an early alarm, get your ass out of bed, and get moving before the rest of the world... its enough to make you want to try.
But when you do, you feel groggy, cold, and it takes you an hour to warm up for the day. Then, when afternoon arrives, sleepiness strikes, and it’s all you can do to keep from nodding off (let alone get anything done).
If the point of waking up early is to crush your day, why does getting up early suck so much life and productivity out of you?
And, if getting up early is not correlated with success, what truly makes a successful day?
I’ve got three answers to those questions, and they all start the night before.
Mass confusion struck in droves, and baby turtles were scattered everywhere.
It was 9:30 pm in Topsail North Carolina and we were walking along the beach toward our beach rental home to hustle the kids into bed and watch as many episodes of Handmaids Tale as we could before becoming deliriously tired.
Ten minutes earlier, we had wandered passed two lines of people lounging in beach chairs. Some had beers in hand. All were chatting quietly.
On any other night, seeing people drinking and chatting on the beach would have been routine. But tonight, two extremely strange behaviors of this crowd caught my attention:
First, everyone was lined up the wrong way; not parallel with the water, but perpendicular to it. Two rows of people, arms width apart, beginning at the base of the dune and extending down into the ocean wash.
Odd.
Second, there was a strange excitement in the air. The kind of excitement you might feel in the moments leading up to a surprise birthday party; the quiet anticipation of a big event.
Come to find out, we were about to witness just such an event.
There are 24 hours per day and 168 hours per week.
That sounds like enough time to finish your work and have time for yourself. But, as the end of the workweek draws near, you often find yourself with an unfinished to-do list and having spent very little time on yourself or the activities you enjoy.
This is fine on occasion. Nobody is perfect, nor should be.
But if this scenario repeats week after a week, you may soon find that your life has become all work and no play. Something which is a chilling thought by itself.
To help you strike a proper work-life balance, here are five simple ways that should help you find time for yourself and let you enjoy life more:
Less than 10 minutes after waking, I threw up cigar chunks into my master bathroom toilet.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Twelve hours earlier, the groom and I were celebrating his upcoming wedding with a night on the town in historic downtown Leesburg, Virginia.
As you might have guessed, this night included alcohol and stogies.
We drank and walked and talked and smoked and drank some more. We hopped from restaurant to restaurant, downing wine and beer and whiskey, all the while drawing down a box of cigars purchased at the local tobacconist.
At one point, the groom had me laughing so hard that I bit down on the cigar butt, crumbling the outer paper, which I inhaled, coughed up, then involuntarily swallowed.
I washed it down with a swig of wine—all of it came up the next morning.
Gross, I know.
But it perfectly illustrates the entire point of this article...
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting around 30 thousand spam calls a day.
OK, I exaggerate. But sometimes it feels like that.
Anytime an actual phone number shows up on my caller ID, I know it’s from someone I don’t know.
When my Mom calls, it says Mom. When my wife calls, it says Elaine. When a telemarketer calls…
I started strong.
I got up at 5:40, meditated, planned my day, got the kids off to school, exercised, and was ready before 8 am.
This rarely happens, but when it does, my day goes well.
Just not this day.