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Small Difficult Things
Want to totally change your life in just one day with one little tip? Too bad, because that’s not how it works. Once in a while a small thing does totally change our lives. Someone happens to say something to us at just the right time and it impacts us forever. Other times we gradually…
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The Building Mindset
I remember reading about the famous marshmallow study, the one where they see if kids can delay gratification or not. Reading about it really haunted me, because a psychologist came to my school in third grade and did a similar experiment on us students. We could have an unspecified “big prize” later, or a small…
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Maintaining a Clear and Positive Mindset
My sister told me about a date she went on recently. When she very politely said that she didn’t think they were a good match, the guy went nuts and said all sorts of rude and outlandish things. Poor guy. He almost certainly knew that he was digging an even deeper hole by saying the…
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Finally Changing Patterns
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, it’s probably very obvious to you that I am terrible at marketing. My preferred method of marketing is to not do it at all and hope that good things happen. This generally works to some extent thanks to you, my readers. Over almost ten years I’ve…
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Home Automation
I don’t think I’ve written about it before, but I’ve been into home automation for a really long time. I can’t remember exactly when I started automating things, but it was definitely no later than 1999, seventeen years ago. Back then I used something called X-10. It was flaky, and if you wanted more than…
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My Six Secrets for Always Being Happy
I know objectively that I did not have a great Tuesday. I woke up well rested, had my tea, got some unexpected work done, and had lunch. I felt prepared. I was entered into a tournament at the World Series of Poker, one where I got 12th last year, and I was hoping to do…
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How I Travel
I’ve been traveling consistently now for over eight years. In that time I’ve visited around seventy countries, many of them several times. But how I travel has changed considerably over those years. While I might think that there are some “wrong” ways to travel, I don’t think that there is one correct way to do…
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NEW BOOK: Around the World in Fifteen Friends
Guess what? I’ve got a new book out. I hate all the launching and promotion sort of stuff, and I’m not sure it actually helped my last book, so I’m going to do things the old-fashioned way and just quietly announce it here. A little over a year ago I wrote a story about visiting…
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How I Drink Tea
A couple people asked me recently to make a post about tea. I’m delighted to hear that people are interested, because I sometimes feel like readers must be getting sick of how much I post about and share pictures of tea. I drink tea just about every day. The only days I don’t drink it…
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Just Got Your First Job? Here’s What To Do With That Paycheck
Summer is just beginning, which means that in my family as well as many others, people are graduating college and preparing to enter the workforce. I just heard that one of my cousins got a job. My first reaction was to be excited for her, and then the second was to be a little bit…
