Optimism doesn’t increase your success.
What it does do is increase your field of vision, which allows you to better notice the opportunities that lead to success.
If you have a bad attitude about your job or your relationship or your battle with depression, odds are, you won’t get better­­ because you won’t do the necessary research on the resources that will make you better. You’ll never find the solution that leads to the solution. These are the physical and procedural manifestation of a bad attitude.
On the other hand, consider the show Law & Order.
Before they solve the big case, the detectives always track down the guy who visited the prostitute who sold drugs to the guy who used to share a prison cell with the former roomate of the killer.
Because each of those people is the solution that leads to the solution.
They’re all part of the expanded field of vision.
It’s not about mind over matter, it’s about using your mind to allow more things to matter so you can eventually bump into the best solution.  

Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.
Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?
In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!
Creativity, Innovation & Art 
“Make a character want something, that’s how you begin,” from Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut.
Culture, Humanity & Society 
“The diorama was the original virtual reality experience,” from the obituary of Fred Scherer.
Identity, Self & Soul 
“Our personal culture is constituted of our point of view, our style, our sense of humor, our unique gifts and drives, our voice and our artist’s sensibility,” from Steven Pressfield.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 
“Do we have to live in a world of fictions, falsehoods and figments?” from Why Facts Matter.
Meaning, Mystery & Being 
“Happiness is driven more by experience than things,” from designing happier cities.

Media, Technology & Design 
“You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them,” from The Circle.

Nature, Health & Science 
“Numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of god,” from Pacific Rim.

People, Relationships & Love “He accomplished big things by making himself smaller than the moment,” from Thomas Friedman’s obituary of Mandela.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling
“Responding to life in a manner that’s free from our conditioning,” from Psychology Today.
Success, Life & Career“People without dirty hands are wrong, doing something makes you right,” from The Cult of Done.

Work, Business & Organizations“Any tension sense by anyone anywhere has some place to go to get rapidly and reliably processed into some kind of change,” from the genius of Holacracy.

See you next week!

If you don’t believe in magic on some level, your art is going to suck.
And when I say magic, I’m not referring to supernatural enthusiasms or ancient mythologies or occult practices or bewildering godspeak, rather, those moments of virtuosity and mystery and meaning, those acts of human moral beauty that provoke the kindred and start a conversation with something much larger than yourself.
In short, awe.
That’s what we mean when we say magic.
In the landmark study on awe, researchers defined it as a moral, spiritual and aesthetic emotion. Something has the power to transform people and reorient their lives, goals and values in profound and permanent ways. Making awe one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth on the planet.
And that got me thinking.
How do we create moments of awe for our customers? How does the street performer or the landscaping company or the charity foundation embed the experience of awe into their daily work?
According to aforementioned research, awe is the intersection of two moments:
Wow and how.
Wow, meaning you’re in the presence of something sizable and powerful and prestigious, and the sense of vastness overwhelms you. Holy crap. This is amazing. Where’s my camera?
How, meaning you can’t comprehend the mechanics behind that thing, and the desire to accommodate that experience into your worldview overwhelms you. No effing way. How the hell did she do that?
That’s how you create awe. Wow plus how.
It’s not a proven formula. It’s not a predictable construct.

But if you dabble in magic early and often, eventually, it’s going to stick.

Identity crisis is a group effort.
It may manifest in the individual, but it’s magnified by the collective.
When you realize you’re done doing that which defined you, giving up a self that you have come to identify with and call our own, courageously leaving behind a world you know so well––maybe the only world you’ve ever known and felt home in––the first brand of devastation that manifests is existential.
Imagine an entrepreneur who retires or quits or sells her company after ten years of painstaking work. It’s like she doesn’t know who she is without the business. Nor does she know how to cope with reality in its absence. She’s become a stranger to her own life.
But then comes the other brand of devastation.
When the identity crisis magnifies socially.
And it makes perfect sense.
Humans understand the self in the context of other people. We regulate our emotions and understand the world by connecting with others. And we form our identities based on what we hear ourselves say to people.
Back to our example of the entrepreneur. Without the company attached to her anymore, other people don’t know to relate to her anymore. Because for so many years, that was her chief form of identification. She made the business the most important thing about her. People couldn’t tell where she ended and the company began. And in their eyes, she was always going to be nailed to that cross.
But that’s my work, not my whole self, she says to herself.
Exactly.
Since identity is a social construct, until she changes her attitude about what her role in the world is, nobody will be able to tell the difference between her work and her whole self.
Which means, she needs to reeducate people. To teach them how to treat her and what to call her. And to live her life in a way that proclaims to the world:
I am bigger than my past. I am surrendering my case history. I am outgrowing yesterday’s definition of myself. I am becoming more than what I am known for. I am living larger than my labels.

And with a ton of work, slowly, the new self starts to emerge.

Every once in a while, life takes me out of myself.
After a certain amount of time and speed and space and pressure, I start to lose touch with my identity. I get stuck in a system of other people’s expectations and agendas that puts me at odds with myself. And all of the sudden I realize, oh crap, if I don’t find a way to get back to normal, to exist in a manner that makes sense to me, I’m going to freak out.
And it’s not just me, either.
I once read an interview about Jerry Seinfeld’s writing process. He said that if he can’t tinker, he grows anxious. That if he can’t create and arrange his ideas around the world’s messy confusions and trivial irritants, life isn’t fun for him.
Interesting.
Maybe this experience of existential distress touches us all. Maybe these mini identity crises are more common than we realize. Maybe we all have those boundary moments when our motivation for doing something is, quite simply, just to feel normal again. Even if only for a short while.
And if that means going for a run at dawn when it’s dark and there’s nobody in the world but you and the stars, so be it.
It’s a recalibration of the soul.
A portable, purposeful and private sanctuary to reconnect with the self, the body, the spirit and the heart. A sacred space that holds a sense of predictability and routine and control and brings some measure of coherence back to your life. A highly human experience, free of the existential torrents of life, free of the crazy demands of others, that gives us cognitive richness and psychic nourishment.
Whatever it takes to carve a path back to yourself.

Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.
Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?
In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!
Creativity, Innovation & Art 
“In songwriting, the real trick is to be the spider that doesn’t get caught in its own web,” from an interview with Paul Weinfeld.
Culture, Humanity & Society 
“We live in an alpha world, one in which the strong and popular and smart and fast win,” from Rob Bell’s blog.

Identity, Self & Soul 
“Maturity is always a return to reality about yourself,” from Gentle Persuasion.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 
“A woman who died ten years ago, and she can’t stop talking about it,” from an interview with Amy Hempel in The Paris Review.

Meaning, Mystery & Being 
“Human beings are notoriously lousy at predicting what will make them happy,” from an article in Psychology Today.

Media, Technology & Design 
“Technology doesn’t just do things for us, it does things to us, changing not just what we do, but who we are,” from the brilliant Sherry Turkle.

Nature, Health & Science 
“Science doesn’t want to take god away from people,” from a report on NPR.

People, Relationships & Love “Giving away little margins of time you never will miss will become riches to someone,” from my favorite book, Try Giving Yourself Away.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling
“By the time poor children are three, researchers believe they have heard on average about thirty million fewer words than children the same age from better off families,” from an article about poverty’s vocabulary.

Success, Life & Career“Don’t stop believing unless your dream is stupid,” from Kid President.

Work, Business & Organizations“I want to hire people with humble ambition,” from The Corner Office.

See you next week!

Fear is a significant factor in most people’s lives.

And if your organization wants to matter to those people, you need a tool that helps customers feel less afraid. Some platform, some interaction or some mechanism that gets their jitters out and gives them something to face the world with.
Covestor is the world’s largest online platform for investment management. It’s a world of great investors that allows you to automatically mirror their strategies, trade for trade, all from the comfort and safety of your own account.
But that’s still scary. When money moves, people take notice.
Covestor understands this fear, so their site let users try out the service with a hundred thousand virtual dollars, simulated functionality, account mirroring, performance tracking, for free, with no obligation and no payment details required.
It’s a safe haven. An interesting place where people can interact. And a simple, smart and social platform, free from the constraints of regulation, that identifies the line between what financial companies can do and can’t do, and lets people play right on top of it.
Most importantly, it’s a compelling case for why investing doesn’t have to be scary. And it’s a reminder to people that they’re all good investors, they just don’t know it.
Are you letting fear boss your customers around?

Reinventing yourself isn’t about changing everything.

It’s about springing yourself past a frontier and letting the constellation of your identity expand so you can see the beginning of a different and more courageous dream.
It’s about letting go of everything you’ve tried and built and accomplished and accumulated so far, except for the person you’ve become, and using that as the raw material for whatever comes next.
It’s about interrogating what it is that you’re intrinsically the best in the world at, that you have been put on this earth to do, that you’ve already been doing your whole life, that nobody can take away from you, and that people will value and pay money for.
It’s about evolving your work strategy based on market feedback, changing your path path to get somewhere new based on what you’ve learned along the way, keeping your career in permanent beta and remaking yourself as the world changes.
And how will you know if you’ve done a good job reinventing yourself?
If you feel like a whole new person, and yet, more like yourself than ever, you did a good job.

I’ve been an inventor my whole life.

Making things has always been the most natural way for me to engage with the world. When I get up in the morning, there’s this mechanism inside me that wonders what I’m supposed to make next. And it’s relentless. Like the junkie who walks thirty miles to get twenty dollars, the mechanism doesn’t shut up until it finally gets its daily fix.
That’s why, if I don’t spend at least a little time each day, tinkering away, I grow restless. I don’t feel like myself. And I won’t feel like myself until I make something.
But that’s just me.
Or is it?
Maybe it’s not a personality thing. Maybe it’s a person thing.
Human beings, by their very nature, are builders. We make art to capture our feelings, we make tools to amplify our potential, we make games to express our playfulness and we make rituals to celebrate our experiences.
We’re created to create.
And we should never stop. No matter how good, how popular, how useful or how meaningful our creations are, we should never stop inventing. Ever. Because when we stop making things, we lose our innovative edge. And when we lose our innovative edge, we fail to serve the progress of humanity.
Fear not innovation. Fear only that which dims your capacity to innovate.
Stay calm and carry on?
More like get excited and make things.

If your idea is everywhere, you win.

The hard part is, millions of people around the world are trying to make their ideas more popular than yours. And with the exception of the few that hit a run of dumb luck, most of the ideas you want to spread, won’t. Most of your marketing attempts are reminders of just how deaf the world really is.
Even the big guys, the companies with the most brilliant and expensive marketing campaigns out there, fail to attract more than a modest amount of attention.
But don’t let that be another excuse not to try.
They might not make you any money, but if your ideas make you excited to get up in the morning, if they help you find a home for all of your talents, and if they make meaning in the world to the people who matter most, you win too.