ALL EPISODES

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 this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “You Have to Be Afraid.” Fear is the only real adversary we have in life. And in a way, it's the only thing you will ever have to face. But ironically, I think it's also the gateway to paradise.

If you have the luxury of being able to go on a journey of self-discovery in order to find yourself, I think you can count yourself amongst some of the more privileged of the world. For a lot of people, life doesn't really give them any choices of who to be. Finding yourself is irrelevant. When you're too busy staying alive to sit and ponder it.

The modern culture around parenting says we need to have our kids in sports programs, put them in the best schools, take them on nice vacations and dress 'em in really great clothes. But I kind of wonder if we traded in child raising for child worship instead. I can tell you as a father to three kids that I love being a parent, but it isn't always what we make it out to be in our imaginations. It comes with a lot of extra work that no one's going to pay us for. As a parent, I

You know, a surprisingly hard question for me to answer is.  What would make for the best day ever? So, the quick answer that comes to mind would have to do with some kind of acquisition. Maybe winning the lottery would be the best day ever. That really sounds pretty nice. I'd love to win the lottery or win a new car or get some incredibly expensive thing handed to me. But when I think about my best days so far, they don't really have much to do with getting new things.

I think the best way to figure out what an ideal day is to ask yourself first, what a terrible day is to start. I think not sleeping enough would make for a pretty terrible day. I'd be agitated, my senses would be dull, and I'd probably be feeling lazy. If I really wanted to have a terrible day, I'd probably put some kind of intense pressure on myself. Maybe there'd be an important deadline that I forgot to prepare for, and I'd be filled with dread.

I wonder sometimes if we're deluding ourselves by thinking that to love another person is something that we actually choose to do. Is love really something we can decide to just have? All of a sudden, I'm not even sure two people are even talking about the same thing when they talk about love. In the English language, the word love is so broad. It could probably be applied to describe at least 50 different emotions. The love you have for your children isn't the same as the

t seems like men, in particular, me included, really like to think of things in terms of conquering and mastering. As unlikely as it is that any of us will conquer the world, it seems to reflect our desire to achieve. Conquering the world, of course, is the ultimate achievement. And so, I think that's what draws us to the idea.But for normal people, I think what's truly relevant is learning how to conquer our own time in order to conquer anything, whether that be the world or

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 this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Big Improvements Are Made of Small Ones.” Sometimes the difference between those that have everything and those that don't is a lot less than we might think. The more successful people that I m

 I found myself reading an autobiography of Benjamin Franklin recently. Now, I love biographies, especially autobiographies. It makes me feel like I've had an opportunity and A small way to live another person's life. And in a metaphorical way, I aspire to be able to say someday that I've lived a thousand lives.

Porcupines seem to be a good example of this. Porcupines, to my knowledge, are not terribly aggressive animals. There are not very many predators willing to try to take them on. If a porcupine did have to face a predator, I don't think the porcupine would win very often. But the cost to any predator wanting to eat it is not going to be cheap.

Not crossing the road until the crossing light says go. Doesn't always benefit the individual, but it does make for a more predictable world that everyone else can rely on. I've had enough close calls with Jay Walkers that I think there may actually be some benefit to that one. Now in the United States and more broadly throughout Western civilization, we value independence above most things, and it seems to work well enough, but the concept that one should strive towards maki

We become afraid to try things unless we think we can do it perfectly the first time. And it isn't even the parent's fault half the time because we put this pressure on ourselves just as much as anyone else.  One of my children tends to panic really easily if something doesn't go right, or they mess something up.

So, I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart. And just a warning, there are some religious themes in this, not because this is intended to be a necessarily a religious podcast, but you know, religion is part of my life. And so I discuss it a fair amount in here. Anyways, the thing I want to talk about is, is Beliefs, you know, there's been a lot of times in my life when something I believed was challenged leaving me uncomfortable, the very possibility of chall

I hate the sensation of falling. I've never gone skydiving, and I have absolutely no interest in trying it. When I was young, I remember pleading with my parents not to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. because of the very brief moment in the ride where you drop down a steep slide. I may have been like 10 feet down, and it was still on an angle, but it scared me to death. Regardless, I was made to go on the rides with the rest of the family. It's not l

Sometimes the easiest way to figure out the things that  you should be doing is to figure out the things you shouldn't be doing. For some reason, it's a lot easier for our little minds to focus on things that we don't like. So I put together a list of 10 ways to be a disappointment to someone to help narrow down our options. I focus more specifically on. How to be a disappointment to your friends and family. So, by no means is this list conclusive, but at the very least, I

Almost my entire childhood, I was indoctrinated by school propaganda and child programming into thinking that to be valuable in society, you had to be a good leader. We were told that we were all leaders and that we needed to lead the people around us. We were pumped up with motivational stories and told how special we were, but if everyone is meant to grow up to be a leader. Then who's going to be left to follow?

Journaling is less so a process of writing and more so a very active way of thinking. At the end, you have a very coherent, thought out piece of writing that has just organized your thoughts internally as well. I don't know that we are really capable of thinking without bouncing our thoughts off of other people. Without other people to balance out our views, we can really spiral into crazy. But writing has the magical effect of allowing us to see our own thoughts as an out

Carl Jung once said, we are not what happens to  us. We are what we choose to become. I think people have a lot of voices in their head trying to tell them who they are. Some voices are louder than others, and for a lot of us, the voice that is the loudest is the one that tries to tell you that you can never be better than your worst moments. On the other hand, some of us like to succumb to the voice that says we are God's gift to humanity.  But I believe there is a voice

There are few easier ways to shoot yourself in the foot than to get hung up on what's fair. Bad people deserve bad things to happen to them, but the efforts we make to try to make them pay don't always serve us. Maybe someone wronged you, maybe they stole money from you and got away with it, but in our attempts to seek out justice, maybe we're just causing more harm to ourselves.

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 this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “We Are All Just a Little Delusional.” There have been a few times in my life where I found myself briefly thinking or believing something that upon further reflection was absolutely ridiculous