their motor skills and their cognitive abilities and nodded off more frequently. No surprise.

How long has the wound been festering? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Williams’s story shows the opposite pattern. And if he could choose the path of forgiveness after the unthinkable tragedy he endured, surely we can all let go of the grudges that we have been holding on to, which have made it harder to focus on the things we truly care about. A

There’s an easier alternative. We can establish upper and lower bounds. Simply use the following rule: Never less than X, never more than Y.

Since the end of the Cold War, the military has used the acronym VUCA to describe our global environment: one that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In response to this new normal, the military has developed several approaches we can apply to make it easier to do what matters on our own everyday battlegrounds.

he has learned that when it comes to languages, embracing mistakes leads to accelerated learning. He teaches his language students to imagine they have a bag full of one thousand beads. Every time they make a mistake talking to someone else in the language they take out one bead. When the bag is empty they will have achieved level 1 mastery. The

Instead of procrastinating, wasting enormous amounts of time and effort planning for a million possible scenarios, or charging full steam ahead at the risk of traveling miles down the wrong path, we can opt for taking the minimum viable first action: the action that will allow us to gain the maximum learning from the least amount of effort.

If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.

Recent research in physiology supports Maddon’s counterintuitive response. Studies show that peak physical and mental performance requires a rhythm of exerting and renewing energy—and not just for athletes. In fact, one study found that the best-performing athletes, musicians, chess players, and writers all honed their skills in the same way: by

The French author Guy de Maupassant tells the story of one Maître Hauchecorne, an industrious man who strove to be an upstanding member of his community—that is, until he was falsely accused of an act he did not commit. His supposed crime was picking up someone’s lost wallet off the sidewalk (in fact, it was a piece of string) and failing to return