Supritha S

Rather than going for the maximum challenge you can handle (for a mercifully short time) you’re looking for that “just challenging enough to improve” window. And once you find it, you live in it.

2) Recognize the moments when you’re about to sell out your Future Self. These moments often happen when you are in retail establishments. They often involve televisions or other gratifying electronic devices, including the snooze button of your alarm clock. They also frequently involve high-fructose corn syrup and disposable packaging.

That’s the elegant secret to discipline: valuing your future self as highly as you value your current self, at least long enough to get your Right Now Self to do the right thing. That moment of choice is where the ants go one way and grasshoppers the other.

Like your body, there are many forces and feedback loops that moderate the particular equilibrium of your habits. Your daily routines are governed by the delicate balance between your environment, your genetic potential, your tracking methods, and many other forces. As time goes on, this equilibrium becomes so normal that it becomes invisible. All... See more

And convenience is the hallmark of a semi-lazy decision–it’s just easier.

That is exactly the gentle ramp’s strength: you can live on it. You’re not trying to just get through it.The gentle ramp demands things of you that the boot camp doesn’t. Staying on it requires you to develop certain aspects of character. You have to accept, for example, that when you’re on a sustainable trajectory, improvement takes time, and that... See more

Take the burgeoning field of biomimicry, for example. Biomimicry looks to nature for solutions to modern problems — after all, Mother Earth has had 3.8 billion years to work out all the design kinks. Biomimetics requires practitioners to be more than engineers, more than biologists, more than ecologists, more than designers, and more than... See more

When thoughts are as clear and far-between as they are on retreat, you learn what your mind is actually like—the events that send it spinning, the places it goes when you’re not watching, the trouble it gets into. You start to see the billiard-ball effect a single thought can have on you, how easily it sets off emotions, how those emotions shape... See more