What are you tracking in your life? Numbers matter — you cannot manage what you cannot measure — but the moment a measure becomes the target, it stops measuring anything. In this episode: Goodhart’s Law, the famous cautionary tales of metrics gamed into uselessness, and why after 30 years and 600,000 people live I can...
Think of the best moment of your life. I’ll bet it wasn’t on a couch. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades asking thousands of people when they felt most alive, and the answer was never passive comfort. Flow — peak experience — arrives when your skill meets a challenge just beyond it: voluntary, stretched effort toward something...
You guard your money like a soldier and hand out your hours to anyone who asks. You would never give a stranger your bank details — yet every day the industrialised attention economy takes hours of the only resource that can’t be earned back, and we call it relaxing. Seneca made the argument two thousand...
Here’s the most liberating sentence in psychology: nobody is thinking about you. Thomas Gilovich’s Cornell studies mapped what we now call the spotlight effect: we massively overestimate how much other people notice us. In the famous experiment, students wearing an embarrassing t-shirt guessed roughly double the number of people who had actually registered it. The...
You’re not staying because it’s good. You’re staying because you’ve already paid. The sunk cost fallacy is the very human inability to walk away from what we’ve already invested — money, years, energy, identity. We focus on the size of the loss instead of the only question that matters: what is the next dollar worth?...
You will change your beliefs only when you have a big enough purpose. People assume changing a deep belief takes decades of therapy, journaling and self-exploration. What I’ve seen in years of coaching is that beliefs move fastest under leverage — when you link the negative belief to the non-attainment of something you deeply want....
Most of your stress comes from trying to run a department you were never given. Epictetus — born a slave, became the most sought-after teacher in the Roman Empire — built his entire system on one sorting question: is this in my control or not? Your judgments, your effort, your responses: yours. Outcomes, other people’s...
You think you’ll be happy when you arrive. I’ve arrived at a few places — let me save you the trip. Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar named it the arrival fallacy: the belief that reaching the goal — the number, the title, the finish line — will deliver lasting fulfilment. It doesn’t, and the mechanism is hedonic...
ou will regret almost none of your failures. You will regret nearly all of your hesitations. That’s not a motivational slogan — it’s what the research shows. Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich found that over a lifetime, regrets of inaction outnumber regrets of action roughly two to one, and the gap widens as we age. In...
ou’re not fragile. You’re probably not even just resilient. Today I want to show you a third category most people have never heard of — and why it changes how you see every hard thing in your life. Fragile things break under stress. Resilient things return to their original shape. But antifragile systems — muscle,...