Category: Mental Models

If you’re looking for a better life then you need to understand the difference between a dream and a fantasy. Think of a dream as a picture of the person you could become. But a fantasy turns that dream into a place you create in your mind to escape to. Dreams are a beacon of…

There’s a big difference between believing that you need permission to do something and believing that you’re free to act until something stops you. The first belief implies that you’re not in control. And any freedom given to you is a gift. Believing this makes you less creative and powerless. The second belief implies that…

If you want to achieve your dreams but they’re destroying you then give up on your dreams. This doesn’t mean take on the belief that you could never achieve them. It means take on the understanding that you aren’t currently capable of accomplishing the thing you desire. See yourself for who you are. If you…

Sit down and close your eyes. Breathe in and out once. Then breathe in, breathe out and hold your breath while pressing your hands together in front of you. Flexing your belly, and squeezing everything forwards in a closing motion, tightening the front of your body. Wait, and when you feel an instinct to breathe,…

If you want to progress you have to go where play is found. Play is the place between newness and familiarity where progress can happen. You can’t actually progress very far by working at the edge of your ability. It’s occasionally useful but tears you down and requires too much recovery time to create consistent…

Learn to bend without breaking. Be a monster who grows every time a rock is thrown at you. Take the rocks and set them under your feet to make a sturdier foundation for yourself. Become antifragile by learning to benefit from the chaos around you. Entropy, the disorder of the universe that takes us all…

What’s more important. Accomplishment? Or accomplishment over time? It’s well known that most of our past selves were idiots. So assuming any one accomplishment is the end all be all of your existence and journey to success is a statistically stupid call to make. And if the next accomplishment isn’t the most important thing, and…

People approve of people who don’t seek approval. So if you seek approval you won’t receive it. There are many things that dissapear when you chase them. Pleasure in most forms, for example, if you try to get more and more of it then it will become less and less effective until you don’t feel…

Aristotle said that money needed to have specific properties, so that it could be used as a unit of measure for things you want to exchange. Much like the centimeter or inch is useful to know how big an object is physically. Money is a unit of measurement that helps us measure how much we…

If you’re struggling to improve your life and it’s not working you might be looking down on the simple things you need to do. For example, reaching out to a new person is a simple idea. But it’s hard. And it’s easy to run the numbers and think you’ll need to meet ten people before…