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36 Interesting Articles to Stimulate Your Mind

Here you’ll find the most popular articles and resources on my site. If you’re looking for something specific, check out this listing of all articles here.

Distraction

Consumer Psychology

Habits

Motivation

Decision Making

Productivity

Focus

Indistractable Relationships

Introspection

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Distraction

How to Stop Overthinking

We all dwell on unresolved personal conflicts from time to time. Who hasn’t ruminated on a hurtful comment or unintentional harm we might have caused someone? Feeling bad about something you did, or something done to you, is human. But while it’s expected that the arguments we’ve had, the negative events we’ve experienced, and the major decisions we face haunt us, rumination can also pile on new problems.

How to Handle a Distracting Boss

See if you can relate to Sarah. She’s a software engineer who loves her job—except for her manager, Tom. To Tom, everything is a crisis worthy of interrupting Sara, even when she’s trying to focus on her work. One morning, while Sarah was coding a critical feature, Tom called and asked her to drop everything to help with an urgent report for the CMO.

How to Become an Indistractable Reader

When I was growing up, you couldn’t pay me to read a book about self-help or business. Now, I read between 60 to 80 books every year. A good non-fiction book is the distilled knowledge of years of research and insight and costs just a few bucks. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of such a cheap, efficient way to learn lessons that could change your life without having to do the work or live the experiences the author had to bear?

Consumer Psychology

The 4 Secrets to Storytelling for Business

Every successful leader, marketer, or entrepreneur is, at heart, a great storyteller. Storytelling is not just an art—it’s a science, grounded in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral design.

Is Psychiatry Keeping Us Sick?

Something is deeply wrong with the mental health system. Instead of leading to recovery, it often perpetuates cycles of dependency on therapy, medication, and diagnoses. Psychiatric diagnoses, which are unreliable to begin with, have become our identities rather than tools for recovery.

Sales Psychology: Why You Make Terrible Buying Choices

Did the load of gift returns you made in January make you realize that you need to be a smarter shopper? During the holidays, we’re bombarded with ads and sales pitches that use psychological tactics to grab our attention. These messages make it tough for us to make smart shopping choices.

Habits

The Pain Paradox: How Fear of Pain Creates More Pain

In the opening shot of the music video for “Throw Some Ass,” the camera scans a clinical white sign: “Sofi Tukker Center for Asses That Don’t Move Good.” Inside the mock hospital, a heart monitor flatlines—until the beat drops. Suddenly, the music video erupts into a NSFW riot of sensual movement.

Why You’re Always Busy but Never Productive (and How to Fix It)

Most of us don’t think about how we spend our professional time—we just try and keep up. But the secret to working smarter (not harder) lies in managing our most precious resource. Luckily, we have the best time-management technique—timeboxing—to help us. Sahil Bloom breaks down timeboxing categories even further in the work domain to ensure each type of work gets its due.

The Surprisingly Strong Case for Luck in Sales

My wife and I started our first business together in 2003. We sold solar panels in Long Island, New York, which meant making thousands of in-home sales calls. Before we entered a potential customer’s home, we had a little ritual. We always looked at each other before we opened our car doors and said, “Let’s go sell a solar system.”

Motivation

Why Seeking Approval is Killing your Potential

That flutter of excitement when someone likes your post. The warm glow after your boss praises your presentation. The slight panic when your work receives criticism instead of praise. Sound familiar?

Fail! Fail a Lot! It’s Good for You

Failure is baked into the human experience. So why are we so terrible at dealing with it? Fear of judgment and the stigma that our failures reflect poorly on us discourage us from trying new things. Negative self-talk and rumination convince us that our failures mean we’re incapable and undeserving. But failure is typical in all professions.

Only People Who Believe in Luck Have It

Richard Branson will be the first to tell you that he’s generally a lucky person in business and life. An adrenaline junkie, he’s lived through several near-death experiences, including in the early ’70s, when he and his then-wife survived a shipwreck that no other passengers did by jumping off the boat in a storm and swimming to shore. Branson isn’t the only uber-successful person to say that luck was on their side.

Decision Making

The Magic of Now, Not How

Airbnb began as a weekend project when the founders sent an email offering their living-room air mattress to hotelless attendees of a major design conference. Facebook started when Mark Zuckerberg built a clone of ConnectU over the weekend and told everyone in his dorm about it. Most of us think we are never ready for what we want: being in a relationship, living in another country, or starting a business. But the best way to make it happen is to start immediately.

Decoding Self-Serving Bias: A Spy’s Guide to Clear Thinking

One Sunday morning early in my career, I arrived at work to find a colleague of mine already there. We were working on a critical piece of software for an upcoming covert operation. He approached me shortly after I sat down at my desk. “That code you were writing was supposed to be done two days ago,” he said. “The operation is tonight, and we can’t go without you. You’ve put the whole thing in jeopardy.”

Don’t Write About What You Already Know — Instead, I’m “Writing To Learn”

For me, writing is a wonderful way to go deep on a problem I’m struggling with. As my friend and fellow author, Gretchen Rubin told me, “Research is me search.” When I’m struggling with one thing or another, my first step is to think through the problem myself. But there are still problems so tricky that they take even more thinking through.

Productivity

How Successful People Timebox

Timeboxing is the most powerful time-management technique. However, there is no one way to timebox. Some people keep the same schedule every week and review it on Sundays. Others change their timeboxed calendar daily and review it the night before. This step-by-step guide, plus timeboxing examples from real people, will help you figure out what timeboxing looks like for you.

Control Your Calendar (Not Your To-Do List) and Success Will Follow

Our society celebrates getting things done. Long hours, overflowing inboxes, and maxed-out calendars become badges of honor. But this relentless pursuit of output can leave us feeling drained, disconnected, and unfulfilled. We neglect the things that truly matter to us—family, personal growth, health—because tasks, not our values, dictate our schedules.

Work Productivity Hacks & Tips for Today’s Workplace

Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report highlights a stark reality: disengaged and burned-out employees are draining 9% of the world’s GDP, resulting in approximately $8.8 trillion in losses. On the other hand, engaged employees are 18% more productive and...

Focus

How to Protect Your Focus Without Burning Bridges

Most professionals don’t struggle with time management. They struggle with people-pleasing.From an early age, we’re conditioned to say “yes.” But this automatic response creates a significant dilemma: every time we say yes to something inessential, we’re implicitly saying no to work that actually matters.

One Question to Help You Get More Done

It was 9 a.m. and Wendy, a freelance marketing consultant, knew exactly what she needed to do for the next hour: be in her office chair to write new client proposals, the most important task of her day. As she held her coffee mug with both hands and took a sip, a fantastic addition to the proposal entered her head. “This is going to be great!” she thought to herself. But before she had a chance to write down the idea — “Ping!” Her phone buzzed with a notification.

The Pursuit of ‘Flow’ Is Overrated

The idea of flow is considered by many to be the epitome of productivity. Also known as “being in the zone” or “hitting your stride,” flow captivates us with its promise of becoming so absorbed in what we’re doing that we tackle tasks effortlessly. That magical zone is great when you can find it. But what happens when you can’t?

Indistractable Relationships

The Truth About Emotions: What Parents Need To Know

It’s one of those days. You wake up tired, having had a bad night’s sleep. An unresolved fight with your friend or partner is still gnawing at you, but you push it down, knowing you have to get the kids ready for school and finish a major project at work. You feel on edge, and you just want to make it through the day. Knock it off and hold yourself together, you think.

The Real Culprit Behind Plummeting Children’s Mental Health

Kids are suffering. In the United States, 13 percent of three- to 17-year-olds had a mental or behavioral health diagnosis. Parents and teachers often blame social media for rising teen depression rates. But many studies show only a correlation between the two (and a low one at that), not causation.

Introspection

Unlock Your Potential With The Power Of Belief

In 2006, U.S. Team freestyle skier Michelle Roark zoomed down the slope at her first Olympics, conquering hilly terrain that not even a 4×4 could handle. At 31 years old, she was much older than the average Olympic freestyle skier. She had fought through massive obstacles for half her life to get there.

Let’s Not Decide Who Kids Are Before They Do

The true joy of parenthood lies in watching our children unfold into their authentic selves. Yet in our eagerness to know them—and as a natural result of our constant proximity—we often fall into the trap of assigning fixed identities to them prematurely.

Thanks for joining our community of readers. You can also find some of my work here on Substack, my most recent articles here, and three free Google Sheets templates we’ve developed to help you regain control of your time and attention: