Tag: Travel

It turns out that sometimes, in South America, four hour bus rides take seven hours. And sometimes the air conditioning doesn’t work, and it’s the middle of the day in the summer. Today all of those things turned out to be true. Unpleasant as the ride was, I found it relatively easy to focus on…

The end of a long cruise always feels a bit unfair. It doesn’t seem right that tomorrow morning I’ll be unceremoniously dumped onto the pier in Yokohama, Japan. Over the past fifteen days I’ve become accustomed to my new social circle of nine friends and a couple thousand senior citizens. The new routines we’ve made…

My life is so good that I really have no call to complain or worry about anything. That doesn’t always stop me, though. Last night I got some bad news and discovered that the yurt we’re planning on raising definitely won’t get there in time. It’s not going to be crated up for a few…

There’s a concept called hedonic adaptation, which says that we quickly adjust to any increased level of comfort or luxury and cease to appreciate it. Anything good that happens to us becomes our new normal, and we look higher up the ladder, not realizing that we’ll quickly adjust to those rungs as well. The trick,…

Most of what we do is subconscious, driven by our habits. The rest is conscious, primarily driven by our principles. In addition to dictating our conscious actions, principles also guide which habits we decide to create. If we want to improve ourselves and become more effective, our habits and principles are the places we can…

Two months ago I was on a cruise ship making its way through the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic. My friend Brian and I sat down to dinner and were surprised when we were joined by two girls our age, Lucia and Andreea. Cruises aren’t exactly known for hosting people under forty, let alone pretty Romanian…

A lot of life is about managing focus, the battle between breadth and depth. If we take every opportunity that comes our way, we’re left with too little time and energy to make a meaningful impact on any of those opportunities, but if we put all of our eggs in one basket, we may be…

I’m on a Southwest Airlines flight right now, heading from DC to San Francisco. The way food works on Southwest is they hold out a big basket full of snacks, and you take whatever you want for free. None of the snacks are healthy; it’s crackers and cookies and chips. I have to admit, I…

A big reason that I work seven days a week is to keep momentum going. I know that any day I take off will set me back not only the productivity I would have gotten on that one day, but also the additional time it takes me to catch up mentally to where I left…

When you’re working, you’re not out seeing a new city. You’re stuck in a room, probably at a computer, churning away. When you’re working, you’re not out meeting new people. You’re stuck with your coworkers, or possibly no one at all. When you’re working, you’re not out in the sun enjoying the weather and the…