anti-perfectionism

Trying to get rid of your perfectionism is like trying to get rid of the wind by whacking it with a broom. Perfectionism is too powerful for an eradication approach. When you try to get rid of your perfectionism, all you’re doing is hemorrhaging energy at the opportunity cost of attending to your wellness.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of tha

Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot unde

While doing the reporting for my book, I read a postmortem from a successful startup founder. They said something along the lines of: “One of the best things that can happen to you is to achieve professional success when you’re young. That way you can learn that it does little to change your happiness.” For better or worse, achieving your goals sho

I’m reminded of two seemingly contradictory insights I came across in my research. The first was from a study of NIH grant applicants, which concluded that scientists who nearly missed out on grants early in their careers systematically outperformed their peers who received the grants over the long term. “Overall, these findings are consistent with

The second was a point from David Foster Wallace’s iconic This Is Water speech: Whatever you worship will eventually eat you alive. “If you worship money and things…then you will never feel you have enough,” he writes. “Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will di

Limits cannot hold when it comes to pleasure. What is too much one day is not enough on another. What is too much for one person is just enough for another. And so on. This trouble with pleasure can be lived with. What seemingly can’t is the feeling that the basic laws that shore up our society are only just functioning; every day we face new evide

Now the internet has given us access to all of it, all at once, and none of it in its real, embodied, sensually lived and shared forms

we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance