“The only normal people are the ones you don’t know too well.” — Rodney Dangerfield
What I Learned From Writing Down 510 Great Things That Happened To Me In The Last 34 Days
Let’s start with what this post isn’t about.
It’s not about meditation, a gratitude journal, or how a morning routine will change your life.
It’s about how paying attention to your life enables you to to bend it toward that which makes you happy.
What We Should Have Learned in School but Never Did
“We’re moving towards a portfolio model of careers, a world in which kids growing up today will probably have five jobs at the same time. But the current model of education is preparing them for a future that doesn’t exist.”
Most of What You’re Going to Read Today Is Pointless
“Most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to your life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it’s really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.”
How to Turn People into Customers
“If you want to increase your conversions, you’ve got to stop using the same message to the same people.”
Why It Feels like Life Speeds up as You Get Older
“The acceleration of time is the result of our increasing tendency through life to package distinct experiences into bigger ‘chunks.’ For example, for a child, a walk in the park can involve so many new experiences — their first sighting of flowers covered in snow, perhaps, or of a scary dog — that each are remembered as distinct individual events. For the adult accompanying that child, if nothing novel happens, all the varied sensations and impressions associated with that walk may be collapsed — or ‘chunked’ — into a single memory of ‘a walk in the park.’”
How to Make People Remember Your Brand
“We capture a tiny fraction of what happens to us. Since our memory comprises a selection of moments, there’s the possibility of an event being remembered very differently dependent on which precise moments stick in our memory.”
Lessons from 10 Years of Professional Blogging
“Titles are 80% of the work, but you write it as the very last thing. It has to be a compelling opinion or important learning.”
How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity
“Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you.”
Most Managers Are Scared to Talk to Their Employees
“A full 69% of respondents said that they found ‘communicating in general’ to be the hardest part about communicating with employees.”