Advice Gets Good When It Gets Specific

It might seem like you need some wiser person to tell you what the specific advice is, but not really. Say the idea of carpe diem resonates with you. You can ask yourself, “How would I ‘seize the day’ on this sleepy Tuesday afternoon in my office?” and a more specific principle might occur to you:Attempt difficult tasks at times when you want to do... See more

When you start taking these more specific actions, the power of present-focused living starts to reveal itself. When these revelations happen to you, they feel fresh and concrete—the opposite of what you’d expect from an abstract, familiar phrase like “Live in the present.”

May 23, 2024

1. I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This can be large or small: a lecture series, a business, a blog, a house, a child, etc.


2. It’s strange, but I know that it’s common to resist positive emotions, as well as negative ones. Ask yours

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The advice has no value until it is parsed into specific know-how that applies in certain kinds of moments. Once it is, it begins to transform the person.