Magnus

Play” is a mindset shift. It infuses a task with novelty and fun, and maybe a touch of exploration. “Play” turns a chore into a creative experiment and reframes a challenge as a riff. It’s an approach that’s friendly to producing flow, which benefits from positive emotions.

Everyone wants to know how to be liked. But I think we all know, actually, how to be liked, it’s just that it’s hard. It takes attention and openness, and the confidence to present your character like it’s a fun mask you’re wearing rather than a lesson you’re desperate to teach someone. If you have that, it’s simple: when people put energy into... See more

If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you.

That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.

It’s like what happens to a room during a game of “I Spy”: if your friend spies something red, the red stuff glows.

Whe... See more

Buddhists don’t understand human nature. This is rarely more evident than in Alan Watts’ glib dismissal of those who “rush around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” The meaning of life, he tells us, “is just to be alive… it is so plain and so obvious and so simple.” In fact, the meaning of life is to... See more

When I look at it for a long time, I realize that the apple tree behind our woodshed is more complex than any thought I have ever had. But the near-miraculous thing is that if I put myself in a feedback loop where I (1) look at the apple tree, (2) write what I see, then (3) look again and notice what I miss, and (4) rewrite . . . I start to suck... See more

Viktor Frankl — the neurologist, psychologist, and Auschwitz survivor — once wrote that “ Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom .” This brilliant quote points to one of the deepest and most important benefits derived from meditating on the... See more

This way of looking at emotions is so useful that there is a short mnemonic I want you to use whenever you ’ re trying to underst and an emotion that you ’ re experiencing: just say to yourself “guidance system.” It forces you to look at an emotion for what it really is: an evolved response. In this sense, there ’ s no such thing as a positive or... See more