Recent Posts
How Do I Raise My Kids to Revere Life, Love What Is Good, and Reject the Bad?
I don't want to raise the next generation of materialist, short-term focused consumers. But how do I help my kids counter modern culture, resist temptations, and internalize the right ideas?
What is Motivation? Two Theories You Can Use to Understand and Manipulate Your Motivation
Motivation is why you do what you do. If you understand how motivation works, you can better understand the people around you, and importantly, you can better manipulate your own motivation to get more done.
How to Procrastinate Less by Increasing Your Motivation and Decreasing Temptations
We all procrastinate. It's a problem, because then we're not doing the things we know we ought to do. By using the science of motivation and self-discipline, we can learn to procrastinate less and get more done!
Why Self-Awareness and Experience Are Better Than Data
Many people are enamored of quantified self apps. But being aware of your body and what you need—rest, exercise, food, water—is a crucial part of being an embodied being. How can we use both subjective experience and objective data to iterate and improve?
What Does it Mean to be a Scholar?
Drawing on the insights of a Ronin Institute Women IG+ discussion, I explore what ties us researchers and writers together. What makes a scholar a scholar? Is it a title, or a state of mind?
Four Reasons Why Boredom Is Better For You Than You Think
Boredom—the universal feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction that has you reaching for your phone, ready to scroll. But did you know that boredom is surprisingly useful feeling that you can use to your advantage?
"How do you do it?" 5 Ways to be Patient, Calm, and Improve Your Relationship with Your Children
Do you feel your kids are stressing you out? Here are tried-and-true tips for building up calmness and cooperation.
Book Review: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
Without external rewards and punishments, people wouldn't do much. Or would they? People are actually driven toward autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
How to Build Self-Discipline: Why Awareness and Intrinsic Motivation Are Key
Self-discipline is the ability to do what needs to be done, to stay in control, to accomplish your goals. How do you build discipline? Here are strategies I use.
Brainstorming: Are All Ideas Welcome? Why You Shouldn't Discount Ideas Before They're Explored
Why I consider all ideas—not just the "good" ones—and how doing so improves my work, helps me find unique solutions in arguments and software, and leads to counterintuitive insights.
Life as a Practice: Pursuing Excellence in Daily Life
In a practice, you progress: you level up. If we treat daily life as a practice, what does it mean to level up? Hint: It involves effort, excellence, and virtue.
Why You Should Pursue Excellence, Not Success
Pursuing excellence will help you succeed—but pursuing success won't make you excellent. Here's why I follow this life philosophy, and why you should want to, too!
It's Just Fencing: On Approaching Life with Playfulness and Sincerity, Not Seriousness
My fencing coach used to tell me to train hard... but in the end, it's just fencing. It's the paradox of play: real and not real, serious and not serious. Here's how to apply that paradox to the rest of life.
Planning for Success: How Effort Makes Good Luck More Likely
Don't wait for success to happen to you. Make your own good luck—put in the elbow grease to make success more likely!
Opting for Flexibility in Work
Self-employment enables me to achieve the work-life balance I want. Here's why I love the flexibility—and how you can get the same flexibility in your own life.
Coercive Schooling is Pervasive
When giving a TEDx talk, I was stuck by how inundated one organizer was in the coercive schooling system. Here are some examples—and how we can change minds about learning.