Over the last couple of months, I’ve begun to use Reddit as my morning wakeup site. Over a cup of coffee, I scroll through pages of funny photos and interesting links until I’m fully functional and ready to work. One popular feature at Reddit is the AMA (Ask Me Anything) interview series, where famous folks …
You can achieve greater happiness and general life satisfaction by improving the quality of your daily life. There are two ways to do this. You can change your environment or you can change yourself. Each has its merits. Sometimes the best way to boost your happiness is by changing the world around you. Imagine, for …
Last September, I spent a week in Ecuador with two dozen other like-minded folks. We gathered to talk about personal and financial independence. We had a grand time talking “rich people talk”, sharing our stories, and giving advice to other attendees who were just starting down the road to wealth. The retreat succeeded beyond our …
The objects and events around us exist in an objective world. They are what they are. Yet each of us experiences these objects and events in a different way. What happens outside must pass through the filter of your subjective mind before it enters your consciousness. You control what enters your consciousness (and, thus, what …
I found “flow” in the Peruvian Andes. I also tend to experience it while writing. I’ve achieved it while making boxes in a factory, while preparing a speech, and while mowing the lawn. (For real!) Though each of these activities was very different, they shared some commonalities that helped me get “in the zone”. This …
I’ve been blogging since before “blog” was even a word. I posted my first web site over twenty years ago, in the spring of 1994. Back then, all that was available was rudimentary HTML (no cascading style sheets!) and browsers like Mosaic and Lynx. We nerds were early adopters, of course, and we made stuff …
More Than Money is in the middle of a year-long exploration of fear, flow, and freedom. Every Monday, I’m posting an article from what was supposed to be an ebook bout personal and financial freedom. That material wasn’t right for the project, but it’s right for here. And what was that project? At last, I …
I like to travel. When I leave home, it’s as if I’m an entirely different person with an entirely different life. My thoughts are clearer. My experiences seem purer, unclouded by the things I own and do at home. When I’m in another country, everything I have fits into a 46-liter backpack. I’m not burdened …
“How would you like to write an Unconventional Guide?” my friend Chris Guillebeau asked me last spring. As long-time readers know, I’ve joined Chris to travel across the U.S. by train, travel across Norway by train, and produce the first three editions of the World Domination Summit conference here in Portland. When he’s not traveling …
For fifty years, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced “me-high cheek-sent-me-high-ee”) has studied human happiness and creativity. Much of his work has focused on flow, which is his term for “optimal experience”. Here’s how he describes it: We have all experienced times when instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we feel in control of our actions, masters …