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In general, people don’t want you to solve their problems for them. Doing so strips them of their sense of self-efficacy, which is the crucial belief that they are capable of managing their own challenges. Someone who ignores this precept, by lecturing or teaching others too much, can be called...
[Author's note: this post is the narrative version that explains my journey with OCD and how I treated it. The short version provides quick, actionable advice for treating OCD.] The following is the most painful experience I've ever had. Four years ago in the parking lot of my rock climbing...
I've noticed a similarity between people's recurring life problems and coding: When programming, if the output of some code I wrote isn’t what I was expecting, the fault doesn’t lie with the computer, it’s with how I coded it. It doesn’t matter how many times I execute the same code...
> The voice in my head is an asshole. — Dan Harris I've always assumed that habits were just physical things: the habit of washing your hands before eating; the habit of smoking cigarettes after sex; the habit of checking your phone first thing in the morning. Recently I learned...
When I close my eyes, all I see is darkness. It’s always been this way. I thought this was normal. When I was 22, I learned otherwise. I learned that “imagination” is not merely a figure of speech—people can actually see images in their heads. They can picture their dog...
At the ass crack of dawn, in the dark and foggy mist, thousands of people converged on my location, some wearing short shorts, others wearing an elf costume and green tights. I was volunteering at a marathon. The race director told me the day before, “these people have trained for...