Marilyn Monroe and the science of the ‘little extra something’ — On an otherwise normal afternoon in 1955 Robert Stein, a young editor at Redbook magazine, sat at a table in the Gladstone Hotel in Manhattan, slamming rounds of scotch in rapid succession and fighting back a rising swell of panic. He had bitten off far more than he could chew…

We’ve made the bears stronger — We often hear about wildfires, rising sea levels, and record-breaking temperatures occurring across the globe. These things make headlines because people like to chatter about the apocalypse. This isn’t a criticism; it’s certainly much better than staying silent. But in my recent research on climate change I’ve found that if…

There are better ways to motivate yourself — Shortly after starting graduate school I attended a speech the department had put together to motivate new students. The speaker was a well-respected scholar, and I was eager to hear what he had to say. To my chagrin, it was advice that I had actively rejected for years. “If you…

How to flip your motivation problem on its head — I smoked a pack a day for most of my twenties, stopped, and then did it again for another three years after I turned thirty. I loved it. I still do, in fact, which is why I haven’t smoked even once for the last five years. …

Gratitude is great until it’s toxic. We should question it. — Gratitude has become overplayed. I believe that, and not in a vague and nebulous sense; I can tell you how it is overplayed, and by whom, and also why overplaying it damages us. We’ll get to that in a short while. Let’s talk about the good parts of gratitude first. …

We’re not doing weekends right, and it’s hurting us — Here’s a sad truth I realized towards the end of graduate school; for years, I never rested unless I was so damaged that working was nearly impossible. My dad once told me about a time when he overworked himself so badly that he woke up one morning and his body…

What do you sacrifice when you choose one future to chase? — I knew this one asshole, back when I was starting college as an undergraduate in the midwest. I’ll call him Jeff. First, a full disclosure; Jeff isn’t a person — Jeff is a pastiche of five or six people I knew up to that point who shared a set of…

It’s not helpful to be effective at something pointless — I get exhausted by mnemonics. At any given time there are a thousand of them floating out there, and most are marketing fluff. …

What if you took your impostor syndrome and played it straight? — Here’s a delightfully subversive idea. Why not try being an actual impostor? By that I mean, go to work or to college or to your competitive graduate program or wherever it is that you feel like an outsider, an interloper, a fraud… …and for a day or seven, just absolutely…