Presented with a song like Exit Music, It's impossible to know what to add without actually making it worse. How can you play along when It's already there?
Affairs are easier of entrance than of exit; and it is but common prudence to see our way out before we venture in.
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every la...
The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an eco...
This is the moment when we have to decide: does a world exist outside ourselves and is that world worth fighting for? Another 200 species went extinct today. They were my kin. They were yours, too. If we know them as such, why aren't we fighting to s...
Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church. In fact, it’s di...
We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.
Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.
Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.
Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.
Successful continual learning means maintaining a balance and variety of success-oriented attributes, the most prominent being awareness, confidence, persistence, determination, courage, and focus. But curiosity, ingenuity, and creativity may be even...
I have been thinking about the idea of excuses for some time now. They are like menacing demons that creep into our lives without us knowing. They are roadblocks, white lies to ourselves, a reason to set the bar lower, and self-justification for achi...
When I think of excellence in motion, I think of the big picture. Because of the magnitude of this concept, I look at it from an aerial perspective. It is a mindset that challenges the boundaries of self-induced limits—that point where you aspire t...
When you begin to expect that there is always room for improvement, you put yourself in the driver’s seat. Why wait for someone else to figure it out or do it? Expect that you are the one. Expect great outcomes. Expect that you are the best candida...
The BIG push means being able to develop and sustain momentum toward your goal; it is the process of actively replacing excuses with winning habits, the ultimate excuses blockers. Moreover, it is being willing to go to the wall for what you want or b...
Can we stay faithful and persistent in our fidelity even when things seem not to succeed? I suppose Jesus could have chosen a strategy that worked better (evidence-based outcomes) — that didn't end in the Cross — but he couldn't find a strategy m...
Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioural consequences.
It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and...
Incentives are not strategy, they are tactics. Defensive measures.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.
