ALL EPISODES

For some of us, it's hard to see our peers surpassing us in the world. We want to believe that none of our friends are superior to us in any way. So, we sometimes get into the bad habit of tearing down people that aspire for more than we do. For some reason, seeing our friends pass us up, threatens our egos.

To win at something is a concept that is really not that simple. In the context of a game or a battle, the idea is fairly clear. But in the grander scheme of things, winning a battle often doesn't win the war. And sometimes a battle won under the wrong circumstances, might even speed up the ultimate loss of a war.

Humanity is inherently gullible. We imagine ourselves to be these independently thinking entities when in reality we're so easily shaped by the people around us and by the people that know how gullible we actually are. Our pension for belief and what the people around us are saying makes sense. It keeps us safe.

You are not just you, but rather you are the culmination of hundreds of lives that came before you. Your past is more than just a short life that you've lived because of your past. It's also made up of all the pasts of the people that made you who you are, as well as all the past of the people that made them who they were.

Few things feel better than knowing you got a good deal on something.  It's evidence of your superior negotiating abilities, but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. What do we really get out of a bargain? I've lived in the world of business for years now, and I've tried to get good deals from vendors and many, many people

Pain isn't really our enemy. We think it is, but it's not. It's a process that too often we try to run away from when we should be embracing it. As humans, we know how to feel pain like no one else. Not only do we feel physical pain, but we're experts in carrying pain over from our experiences. Our intelligence relative to other species on earth is not just a blessing.

It is hard to know what to do when you're with someone going through a really  hard time, at least for me. Maybe they're crying. Other times they might be yelling, and on occasion they may be hysterical. What's sad is that I think there have been a lot of opportunities I missed to take some of that pain from someone else.

If you really want to love a thing, sometimes you need to learn to hate it.  First, real love is when you can still appreciate something even after the shine has worn off. Imagine you're dating in person. Generally, you wouldn't decide to marry them after a day or two of fun, not because that person is a bad fit, but because you have no clue who that person is yet you haven't seen any of their flaws. The reason we try to date for a while is because no one can legitimately

It seems like there's some amount of value we assign to having the quality of being ambitious, at least in the United States. People advertise that they are ambitious on resumes and profiles and public forums, so apparently being ambitious is a good thing, but why? People say they wanna be successful because they are ambitious, but what does that even mean?

I've hated people deeply. And if you're being honest, so have you, anyone who says they've never hated someone is lying to themselves, but is our nature truly so constraining that there's nothing for us to do about that? The more I think on my enemies, the harder it becomes to hate them, even if I still am at odds with them. I have found in my life that everyone I have ever spoken to thinks they're in the right. They'll gimme detailed arguments for why someone else was ter

I think the vast majority of humanity's pursuits boiled down to an effort to escape pain, but pain built civilization.  We learned to use fire to keep the pain of the cold at bay. We drive cars and use computers to speed everything up so we can avoid the pain of having to wait so long. If pain is such a bad thing, then why is it so often the catalyst for so many good things in my pursuit of understanding?

Once upon a time, I used to think that there was a way to make everyone like me, but that's not possible. I don't think even Mother Teresa was universally loved. No one is universally loved. Some people are able to manage being liked by a lot of people, but those people are also very frequently uninteresting.

Freedom seems like the ability for us to do whatever we want. But that's often the very thing that enslaves us at this moment. I kind of want to check my phone, but is that freedom or compulsion? What most of us like to call freedom is more of a curated form of voluntary enslavement. So, I noticed something a while back.

I had a friend. Literally have his world come crashing down on him this morning when a water pipe burst in his apartment building and started leaking from the ceiling. Understandably, his girlfriend was in a panic and to some degree, so was he. They had just gotten settled into this place with jobs and responsibilities weighing on them. They just didn't have the energy or the time to deal with this on top of everything else they already had going on. I read something in a

When a lion is looking for something to eat. It doesn't think about the antelope's feelings. It is focused and it is hungry, and it takes what it needs. It feels cruel, but the lion would die if it didn't choose to be the predator it was meant to be. People are odd creatures. We can be both predators and prey, and as such, I think that there's an argument to be made that maybe there are times in life.

There's a moment in the Chronicles of Narnia when Peter, one of the young protagonists, comes face to face with a wolf that wants to kill him. When others go to him, the king of Narnia, Aslan says Back, let the prince win his spurs. I never thought much about this until the other day. I happened to be watching the movie with my kids, and I thought, why on earth would you ever risk letting even the least valuable person in your army be killed by an enemy in one-on-one combat i

When I told my five-year-old, his mom and I were divorcing.  I was practically crying, and his response was, it's okay, daddy. I don't care if you split up. If only that was true. He's seven now and struggles more deeply than ever with the fact that the two people he loves most are not together. The ramifications of divorce go beyond what I think we like to imagine. Sometimes over 50% of marriages today are expected to fail. Maybe it's just easier to divorce or maybe the s

If you cannot stand to be apart from them, you're not in love.  You are infatuated or maybe just dependent. The difference between actually being in love or not is the difference between feeling pain when you aren't around them and having no place that you'd rather be. Romantic relationships have a way of being a kind of band aid for a lot of our insecurities. They make us feel less alone. They can bring some excitement to our lives. They bring pleasure to our lives. They

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on...

Have you ever felt like other people got a head start in life, like they were born taller, richer, smarter, more connected? Well, maybe they were, but even with all of those advantages, they're still not guaranteed to win, and neither are you unless you stop playing their game. So, you can play your own game. So, someone was telling me a story recently about this guy that was born with a disease that made his spine form abnormally, and the effect was he didn't grow very tall,