Supritha S

Clarity emerges from quiet, and clarity is the super fuel of peaceful productivity. Ten minutes in meditation a day, or regular five-minute pauses at the end of every hour, is a great way to get started.

There is real pleasure in potato chips, Turtles and gossip too—of an intense, costly, and quickly-fading sort. If you pay attention, the life span of this pleasure can often be measured in seconds, while the costs last much longer. Developing a taste for the subtle sweetness of renunciation makes it progressively easier to take pleasure in the... See more

The least articulate form of the bad actor explanation might be the one we hear most often: that human beings are terrible and society is terrible. As much as that might explain any problem you can think of, it’s a ridiculous conclusion to make, if you consider that our species is obsessed with right and wrong and discerning one from the other.

When you begin practicing a new habit it requires a lot of conscious effort to remember to do it. After awhile, however, the pattern of behavior becomes easier. Eventually, your new habit becomes a normal routine and the process is more or less mindless and automatic.

So why is it so tempting to attribute everything bad to bad actors? I’m not sure it has much to do with solving the problem, or discovering the truth behind it. My guess is that it helps us process our painful emotions about the problem, in at least three ways:

Meanwhile, if you realize that individual failures have little impact on your long-term success, then you can more easily rebound from failures and setbacks. Being consistent is not the same as being perfect.