Passionate and pained

Generic ambition will give you anxiety. Specific ambition will give you direction.

I often joke that I make life incredibly difficult for myself, and these days I do genuinely say this in good humour. But there was a time when I often wondered why I couldn't just be happier with less—doing less, having less, being less.

while research shows that people with a stronger sense of purpose tend to have better overall well-being than those without, newer studies demonstrate that spending too much time worrying about what your purpose is can actually (surprise!) have a negative impact on your health.

People either pursue an interesting or a happy life (that does not mean you are either boring or miserable; it means these values guide your decision-making). Penelope Trunk has a test I came across years ago. People who fall in the ‘interesting’ camp move away from family for career reasons, are maximisers of looks, status and experiences, have st... See more

If one is told constantly that the epitome of personal “empowerment” and self-actualization is precisely that one should never sacrifice anything of the self and its desires—to always prioritize “finding yourself,” “staying true to yourself,” and maximizing autonomy—then the formation of deeper relationships is made effectively impossible.

The outcome of any concerted attempt at self-knowledge could be presumed to be a deep understanding of ourselves. But strangely, the real outcome is rather different. It appears that the more closely we explore our minds, the more we start to see how many tricks these organs can play on us – and therefore the more we will appreciate how often we ar

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