Personal Development with Gray Miller
Who the heck do you think you are? With as much time you spend on social media, that last impulse buy you made because that ad campaign caught you in a moment of weakness, and your sleep habits…you really think you should be in control of your life? Click-bait title and inflammatory first paragraph aside, …
I split my New Year’s Day up between helping out family, watching (intentionally!) the delightfully scary “Bandersnatch”, and taking a course online called “U-Lab.” It seemed a nice balance of pleasure, responsibility, and personal improvement. A good day. It would be hard for me to describe what the course U-Lab was about (you can take …
Let’s start by making this clear: narrative disorder, narrative addiction, narrative perception and some other things I’m going to mention here are fictional conditions created by the talented writer Malka Older. I’ve been enjoying her “Centenal Cycle” of books, and when the phrase occurred in one of them it spurred me to look further. Turns …
During the filming of the Tarantino film “The Hateful Eight” (not a film I’d recommend, incidentally) one of the props was a genuine 145-year old Martin guitar. There were also several duplicates on the set, and the plan was that they would shoot up to a point where the character played by Kurt Russell was …
A while back I decided to take up the practice of de-centering. That is, trying to be less the spotlight at events and such. I wanted to see if I could be a conduit, rather; a holder-of-space that would support the people who came to events. I worked just as hard, if not harder; I …
Are you familiar with Hicks’ Law? Also known as the Hicks-Hyman law, it basically states that the more choices you face, the longer it will take you to make a decision. In my house, we would call this the Netflix-Hulu effect: with so many different shows to watch (or watch again) we spend more time …
I had a weird experience at the airport as I was waiting on my flight from L.A. due to some vagaries of packing and space and the rules of carry-ons, I had no less than three yoga mats and two water bottles among the items I was carrying around the airport. I looked, in short, …
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ― Audre Lorde Among my freelance work, I got an assignment to write an article about how to feel ok about pursuing pleasure in the midst of the world being on fire. I’m not going to quote Billy …
One of the several books I’m working my way through right now is “Designing Your Life.” It’s a book (review forthcoming) that takes “design thinking” and applies it to life planning. Preliminary reaction: good stuff. In the beginning, the authors (who teach a course at Stanford’s d-school by the same name) suggest that you do …
Stress is a funny word. We load it with all kinds of negative connotations, talk about relieving it, coping with it, or even having an idea of a “stress-free” life. Really? Think about that for a moment; would you really want a “stress-free” life? Where you never had the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal, overcoming …