Natalie Audelo

We need to stop fearing boredom and be comfortable with what is going on around us, whether it’s exciting or not. This is an argument made eloquently by my colleague Ellen Langer, who defines mindfulness as the practice of actively noticing new things. You can do that only when you are not distracting yourself.

I recently had a friend drop by to pick up her Girl Scout cookies and my house was A.MESS. Four loads of laundry on the couch including my underwear (clean) and a box containing our cats ashes on the coffee table because it had been under the Christmas tree because she liked trees and my daughter thought it was fitting.

Anyway my friend just... See more

So what we see is that self-actualization is a flywheel: you become self-actualized by seeing reality clearly so you can design a life that fits you, and you become better at seeing reality by engaging with it head-on.

“The more successful you become,” Flemings said, “the fewer people you can trust. The more successful, the less the public thinks of you; billionaire has become a pejorative word. The more successful you become, the harder it is to find someone who will look you in the face and tell you the truth.”

She defines taste as “a deep internal coherence. A way of filtering the world through intuition that’s been sharpened by attention.” It isn’t about aesthetic snobbery or cultural capital – it’s about developing an internal compass that can navigate the endless noise.

BRIAN ENO

So what you see when you watch someone surfing is they take control momentarily, to situate themselves on a wave, and then they surrender. They’re carried along by it, and then they take control again, and then they surrender. I think that’s a very good analogy of what we do throughout our lives, actually. We’re constantly moving between... See more