From the monthly archives:

January 2010

What is Success?

by Stephen Mills January 31, 2010
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Success is having the freedom and ability to do those things you truly want to do and that reflect your most deeply held values. You achieve success by eliminating the 80% to 90% of your commitments, activities, and relationships that don’t totally align with those values.

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Linchpin – A Review

by Stephen Mills January 28, 2010

“My goal is to persuade you that there is an opportunity available to you, a chance to significantly change your life for the better. Not by doing something that is easy or that you’ve been trained to do, but by understanding how the rules of our world have fundamentally changed and by taking advantage of this moment to become something the world believes is indispensable.”

–Seth Godin, from the Introduction

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Common Thinking Traps – Correlation and Causation

by Stephen Mills January 25, 2010
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They key lesson here is to not just automatically assume that because the media reports that people who do A are more likely to experience B, means that A is causing B. It pays to be skeptical of media reports, books, and gurus when they imply something correlated indicates a casual link. This is especially true if it sounds like something that was just dug out of data or surveys and not the subject of proper experiments. If you care about the issue, you should look deeper into the studies.

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A Minute

by Stephen Mills January 22, 2010

I have only just a minute, Only sixty seconds in it. Forced upon me, can’t refuse it. Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it. But it’s up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it. Give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute, but eternity is in it. – [...]

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Mental Models and the Construction of Your Reality

by Stephen Mills January 20, 2010
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All transformation begins and ends with mental models. Because these models dictate how you act under different circumstances and how you interpret the events that happen in your life, when you change the model, you change your life.

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12 Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself

by Stephen Mills January 17, 2010

Asking yourself the right kinds of questions is a powerful tool to keep you focused on what really matters. The following are some of the questions I like to ask myself.

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The Science of Fear – Part II

by Stephen Mills January 13, 2010
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Most of our exposure to dangers or risk in the media leaves out a crucially important factor. What is the likelihood of it actually happening to you? If you are told taking a new kind of birth control increases your risk of breast cancer by 20% compared to an existing type, that may sound bad but you have learned nothing useful.

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The Science of Fear – Part I

by Stephen Mills January 10, 2010
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Fear is an important emotion that had extremely important survival value in the world in which our brains developed. Much of that value is now being misdirected. The emotional makeup of fear is now a big part of what leads to our miscalculation of risk. Further, those with economic or political value to be gained, use the emotion of fear to influence us. It’s easy to motivate people by scaring them. So to truly understand and react to risk in a reasonable manner, we must approach it in a cold and calculating way.

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Unconscious Decision Making

by Stephen Mills January 5, 2010
Light Bulb Brain

One of the most amazing and at the same time unsettling ideas emerging from research in the neurological and psychological sciences in recent decades, is the power and the pervasive nature of automatic unconscious (or nonconscious) thinking. It’s amazing because we have an incredible thinking and problem solving machine operating beneath the conscious level of our awareness. It’s unsettling because it is becoming apparent that some, and probably many, of our decisions are made by unconscious processing before we become consciously aware of them.

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