Tag: Self-Improvement

Maybe it’s because I’m a Millennial, but trusting people is tough. Decades ago, it seems that people were much more gullible and susceptible to scams, meaning they were more trusting. The pendulum has swung the other way for me, and I am much less trusting. There are more scams, more grifters, more people out to take than there were in the past, and I am aware of it and have my guard up. It is good in some cases to be defensive, and costly in others.

Finish reading Trust is tough but valuable

January is almost over, along with the first stage of my 2011 Happiness project. My goal for the month of January was to get 30 minutes of exercise every day. According to Daytum, which I have been using to track activity, I only exercised on 9 days of the month. Not exactly the total I was hoping for.

Finish reading 2011 Happiness Project – January Recap

A review of all the things I have ever purchased fall roughly into three categories

• Things that work very well
• Things that are cheap
• Things that are “best in class” but still don’t work well

I started in the cheap category. Most of that was based on the notion that I needed lots of things and couldn’t accomplish that by buying expensive stuff. From clothing to electronics, my disposable income was spent on crap. And for a while, I was OK with that. I had the time and energy to fix things, figure them out, shop for more, and all of the other energy-draining activities associated with using crap products.

Finish reading Why we can have Nice Things

20 years ago, focus wasn’t such a big problem because people didn’t have many other options. Being a graphics professional meant owning expensive equipment or very expensive computers and software. If you wanted to be published, there was almost no way to do this on your own. You needed to work with a publishing company and that was often a long uphill battle. Even a career in marketing would require knowing the right people and having the right education and experience to match.

Finish reading Focus for Success

Want to be happy like me? There is a single way to do this. Set super-low daily expectations. Yes, you will actually be able to do more. Here is the secret.

Finish reading Real Goals: Super-low Daily Expectations

2009 was a great year. I recapped it here, but now I’d like to set up some goals and guesses for the new year.

1. Do less

   Doing less is hard. There are so many interesting things out there that I want to explore. But, in many aspects of my life, I find myself spending lots of time with the same old things. When you dabble, you have to do it cheaply. I’d rather save up and do something really nice and do it a lot so I can become great at it. This goal is from last year, and will continue to be a goal until I hit it.

Finish reading 2010 Goals and Guesses

My boss Ed Schipul sent us an email that included an interesting list of character behaviors. He got the list of typical flaws from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. It has struck a cord with meand below is the list and then my self evaluation. I’d love anyone’s feedback, but you may want to email me (jmoswalt at gmail) instead of leaving it here.

Finish reading What’s wrong with JMO?

I am very guilty of having what-if thoughts. I used to have many more, but there are still some that irk me. These types of feelings come about when we make a decision and take a risk. Life is all about these decisions, and it would be dumb to assume you could make all the right ones all of the time. When the risk pays off, we rarely go back to recount it. But when things don’t quite work out, we have some trouble.

Finish reading Should I have done that?

I have made some fairly major changes in the past year (move to NYC, quit and move back to TX, etc.) and have discovered that any change is better than no change. The reason for this is what you can learn from change.

Finish reading Any change is better than no change

As much as I’d like to think that I don’t have any regrets, I do indeed. Some of these come from things I have done, some from things I have drank, but most are times when I didn’t take a chance on something trivial. Here are just two examples of times when I probably should have talked to strangers and some reasons why I didn’t.

Finish reading Talking to strangers and my regrets