Today's Challenge:We live in a society of advice columns, experts and make-over shows. Without even knowing it, you can begin to believe someone knows better than you how to live your life. Someone might know a particular something better – like how to bake a three-layer molten coconut chocolate cake or how to build a website – but nobody else on ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:

I once received a fortune cookie that read: "Speak less of your plans, you'll get more done." What's one project that you've been sitting on and thinking about but haven't made progress on? What's stopping you? What would happen if you actually went for it and did it?

Today's entry:I think we've covered the project angle pretty ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:Trusting intuition and making decisions based on it is the most important activity of the creative artist and entrepreneur. If you are facing (and fearing) a difficult life decision, ask yourself these three questions ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:

Write down your top three dreams. Now write down what's holding you back from them.

Today's entry:So, here's my dilemma. I feel like I should be giving different, brilliantly unique answers to each of these questions. If you ask me what my goal is 5 different ways, though, and I give you 5 different answers, then I don't really ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:


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Today's Challenge:Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own ( Read more... )

So, this afternoon a former colleague asked "Would you be interested in writing part of a chapter of a book I'm working on?" to which I said "Sure, sounds fun". This was followed by "Oh, I'm trying to wrap this up for tomorrow." So, I'm writing part of a book tonight that I just heard about for the first time about 6 hours ago. Never thought I'd be ( Read more... )

I've always loved Ira Glass's series on storytelling, but someone reminded me today about one of my favorite bits:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:Take a moment, step back from your concerns, and focus on one thing: You have one life to achieve everything you've ever wanted. Sounds simple, but when you really focus on it, let it seep into your consciousness, you realize you only have about 100 years to get every single thing you've ever wanted to do. No second chances. This ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:The world buzzes about goals and visions. Focus. Create a vivid picture of exactly where you want to go. Dream big, then don't let anything or anyone stop you. The problem, as Daniel Gilbert wrote in Stumbling Upon Happiness, is that we're horrible at forecasting how we'll really feel 10 or 20 years from now – once we've gotten ( Read more... )