Philosophy

Living Like Hermit Crabs

Finding and re-creating yourself is a lifelong journey marked out in moments. It’s an apparent paradox: we’ll never be “there”, yet we’re always trying to get there. Patience and persistence keep this paradox taut. Patience helps us celebrate, appreciate, and acknowledge both what we have and that we’re in process. Persistence reminds us that we [...]

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When It’s Okay To Use People

Act that you use humanity, whether in your person or in another, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.- Immanuel Kant You’re using me right now. You’ve been using people all of your life. And, in most cases, that’s okay. The quote above is a translation of Immanuel Kant’s [...]

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Which Type of Love Are You Cultivating?

Today is Valentine’s Day and many of us are thinking about love. Unfortunately for us, we’re trying to separate the many different meanings of love at the same time, for many modern languages only have one word whose context determines the appropriate meaning. The Greeks were better off in this regard, for they had at [...]

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Straight To Happy

One thing that often trips people up when they start thinking about what they want is that they often don’t think about the difference between something being instrumentally valuable and it being intrinsically valuable. Yes, this is a distinction that a philosopher would make, but it can make a huge difference in how we choose [...]

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Why We Need More Reflection on Enough

Earlier today, I tweeted the following statement: Been thinking a lot about what “Enough” means for my life and biz. If I don’t know where there is, how can I get there? The reactions to this statement were interesting. One reaction was that asking someone to be, have, or do less than they can is [...]

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You Don’t Know What You’ll Do Until You Do It

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. – Thomas Jefferson If you’ve never been in a situation that required you to be courageous, how would you know whether you’re courageous? The comic book version of Plato’s position on ethics is “to be is to do,” [...]

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The Missing Half of Productivity Advice: Why Women Need to Get Involved

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Ali Hale from Aliventures. I‘m a woman, and I care about productivity. So today I want to start reaching towards some answers to the question Charlie posted in What If Women Cared About Productivity? (You might like to read or re-read that post – it’s from December [...]

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How to Think About Possibility – And Why It Matters

The idea of possibility is so embedded into our thinking and language that we often forget that it’s something to think about, but it turns out that a deeper understanding of possibility can radically change our lives for the better. I’ve been thinking about possibilities for a good while now and have been slowly synthesizing [...]

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When A Guardian Sets Down His Shield…

(This is another video post, so if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you may have to click through. I’m still working on figuring out how to patch it through – please bear with me.) Update: my lip/nose situation is doing better. You’ll see that. Big news: I’ve started the process of resigning and [...]

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