A documentary on living happily recently aired on PBS. A lot of the clips from the show (called This Emotional Life) are available on YouTube (here). Here’s an interesting one on intimacy: This particular insight (from Elizabeth Gilbert) was interesting to me partly because I’m reading her book Eat, Pray, Love at the moment. The [...]
How to save the world
The new problems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our ingenuity and our careful, creative consideration. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get meaningfully involved. Why is this? I think there is a collective feeling that these problems are too big for any of us to make [...]
Fail your way to a billion dollars: life lessons from J.K. Rowling
Llloyd Jones (who tragically/hilariously failed to graduate university because of library fines) once said that ‘’the men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.’’ We’ve all heard a lot of quotes like this growing up (though rarely from people who failed to graduate [...]
Your Name
Our names shorthand the discoveries we make in life –the way we saw it along the paths we travelled. The phrase by which we are called will ring our truth, the shape of a life in gestalt. A word or two or maybe more will pull together the meaning that was truest to our hearts. [...]
What teachers know
Today’s graduates face a new breed of challenges as they enter the workforce. They will confront messier, intractable problems such as climate change, global terrorism, antibiotic resistant diseases and persistent market weakness. The same technologies that empowered them as learners at the same time also multiplied the potential for global havoc. And this has changed the definition [...]
The secret of happiness (from Daniel Kahneman and Jerry Seinfeld)
I am by day a mild-mannered Economist, quietly correcting students’ supply and demand diagrams, discussing the long-term profit possibilities in oligopolies. But by night, I get to pursue my real passion in life: surfing –both channel and web. Sometimes I do both at once! So I live a pretty full existence. Sometimes on my quests, [...]
