Rejected before anyone has said no, shut out before the door has closed, paralyzed with fear before the threat exists. You are being lied to. Manipulated, gaslit, and humiliated — all by your own doing — with vitriol you wouldn’t dare think of others, others who don’t think of you enough to do to you,...

The arrival fallacy is blocking your happiness. You were twelve and couldn’t wait to be sixteen and in high school. You were sixteen and couldn’t wait to be nineteen in college, finally out on your own. You were 19 and couldn’t wait to be 21. Graduated, first drink in hand, the unguided adult responsibilities hit...

“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” — Margaret Atwood History wasn’t changed through physical beauty. Imagine the world we’d live in  if Joan of Arc, Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, Margaret Hamilton, and Rosa Parks spent their days preoccupied with beauty ideals of their day and...

Humans aren’t perfectly rational agents that make choices that maximize utility, when faced with risky choices that could lead to big gains, people are risk-averse, preferring to settle for choices that result in lower utility but higher certainty. While loss-aversion is beneficial in many situations, heuristics and personal biases cause us to miscalculate the probability...

Many of our problems are caused when we attach our identity to emotions and thereby, accept their conflating thoughts as fact. Emotions are meant to be felt and released, not identified with. The more we build limiting identities around ephemeral responses to external factors, the more we lose the true self by painting a limiting...

If you protect yourself from the possibility of failure, you protect yourself from success. This is why the growth mindset — backed by neuroscientific research —  is the number one determinant of success.  Accepting that a learning curve and failure is part of the journey towards mastery and success, not innate ability, is what makes...

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right,” Henry Ford once said. Doubt really is often the only dream killer.  The only difference between those who do, and those who don’t, is the presence of self-doubt. There’s no inherent super-ability or extraordinary intelligence behind everyone’s success, but rather, self-responsibility and...

Our thoughts control our reality. They influence how we feel, how we act, and vice versa in a big feedback loop. This is why it’s important to internalize the following: you are not your negative thoughts. Anxious and depressive thoughts create an unreliable narrator that filter your world view through negativity. They make you view...

Procrastination isn’t laziness, it’s the fear of failure. Ending the tendency to procrastinate requires a mindset shift that turns into a habit when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly. Challenging perfectionism, embracing a learning curve, and detaching your value from your performance is the key to getting started. After...

“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt,” once wrote William Shakespeare. Fear of the outcome leads to automatic rejection from every opportunity we want.  Years, decades will pass and you will look back and torturously wonder “what if.” The culprit? Anxiety — it rejects...

Thank yourself for pulling yourself through the past year. The act of marching on during such emotionally, economically, politically turbulent times, in what seems like the second dark age, is the greatest feat of bravery.  If you find yourself drifting into the new year, aimless, betrothed to the passing of time but unsure how to...

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” Yet we spend the now — all we ever have — wishing, escaping, envying, and complaining it away — ad infinitum. A mind controlled by ephemeral external circumstances and validation is a mind of no peace at all — it’s...

No amount of self-care or escapism will ever change what only exposure therapy and stepping outside of your comfort zone by walking by faith does. Escapism will not yield growth, and withdrawing won’t cast out anxiety — it only deepens it. Anxiety is a fear-based unreliable narrator that rejects you before people and opportunities do....

Millenials and Gen Z are more anxious and depressed than previous generations according to various studies. One Harvard Business Review study found that half of millennials reported leaving a job for mental health reasons, while that percentage rose to  75% among Gen-Z. Countless headlines constantly decry this generation’s delayed adulthood and the corresponding rate of...

In our ever increasingly competitive job market how can we confound our unquenchable drive for success with humble gratitude and labor not in vain? How can we live an ethical life amid a “hustle culture” that demands we monetize our every living breath and action and compare ourselves against others who do? How can we...

Merely riding an undetectable pale speck on a universe spanning 93 billion light-years, our existence falls victim daily to our insignificant human conceits. Our psyches attempt to confront this vast, cosmic glory by assigning inordinate, life-or-death value to every inconvenience. We convince ourselves we are special, inherently cursed snowflakes, instead of humbling ourselves before the...

Your early 20s — the mental limbo of feeling like a teenager yet being treated like an adult while thrown into the unpredictable, proverbial abyss. Now imagine the added confusion and pressure of being apart Generation Z and ignoring worldly ways. Forget the “quarter-life-crisis,” 20 is the new age to ruminate over every career, life,...

No one is born knowing how to solve differential equations. A baby isn’t stupid for not knowing how to walk. Skill, it turns out, is just cultivated practice. Yet much our generation’s collective psyche – which heralds apathy and laziness – would have you believe if you’re not born with it, you should give up...

Everywhere, female professionals, leaders, and those at the top of their fields are described as “cold” and uncharismatic, degraded with slurs for the same neutral behavior men exhibit. Treading a careful line between our words and actions not carrying weight for being a woman, and being a ‘female dog’ for practicing a cultivated sternness as protection...

Behind every self-made story of success was not an individual with grandiose,  insurmountable confidence, but rather a need greater than their fears. It is not the absence of qualms which led Joan of Arc to a French victory, or Malala Yousafzai to face off death for women’s education, but rather the belief that something was...

Thank yourself for pulling yourself through the past year. The act of marching on during such emotionally, economically, politically turbulent times, in what seems like the second dark age, is the greatest feat of bravery.  If you find yourself drifting into the new year, aimless, betrothed to the passing of time but unsure how to...

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” Yet we spend the now — all we ever have — wishing, escaping, envying, and complaining it away — ad infinitum. A mind controlled by ephemeral external circumstances and validation is a mind of no peace at all — it’s...

No amount of self-care or escapism will ever change what only exposure therapy and stepping outside of your comfort zone by walking by faith does. Escapism will not yield growth, and withdrawing won’t cast out anxiety — it only deepens it. Anxiety is a fear-based unreliable narrator that rejects you before people and opportunities do....

Millenials and Gen Z are more anxious and depressed than previous generations according to various studies. One Harvard Business Review study found that half of millennials reported leaving a job for mental health reasons, while that percentage rose to  75% among Gen-Z. Countless headlines constantly decry this generation’s delayed adulthood and the corresponding rate of...

In our ever increasingly competitive job market how can we confound our unquenchable drive for success with humble gratitude and labor not in vain? How can we live an ethical life amid a “hustle culture” that demands we monetize our every living breath and action and compare ourselves against others who do? How can we...