Personal Development with Gray Miller
Got your resolutions yet? It’s that time of year with pages full of “retrospectives” and “renewed goals” and “how to crush it in 2019!” An offhand joke from my daughter recently inspired a different take on this arbitrary “end-of-year” fervor: What if we gave it up? Let me make the case for giving up on …
“I’m normally really precise. I did every step in the experiment exactly as it was supposed to go, every microliter measured…except, I did it in exactly the reverse order. It was a mistake that no one had ever seen before!” ”Oh, f*ck me! I just printed one thousand beautiful event postcards…with the wrong date on …
I was reading a near-future dystopian thriller yesterday (Cumulus by Eliot Peper) and a quote literally jumped off the screen and lodged in my brain: “Good leaders made themselves indispensable. Great leaders made themselves expendable.” This saying feels like a part of the kind of understated and constructive leadership I’ve been trying to cultivate, and …
“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 …
It’s been a rough few weeks. I had pneumonia coincide with the biggest event of my year in San Antonio. Not surprisingly, I didn’t recover quickly enough to avoid coinciding with another not-as-big-but-still-significant Open Space in Chicago…but thought I was on the mend, really I did, to the point where I started to push myself …
We are not good at planning. I mean any kind of planning. Ask for any soldier’s list of favorite quotes about war, and odds are one of the top three is some variation of the phrase “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” (If you want to look brainy, when someone tries to …
It’s not a light read, but ”The Evolving Self: Psychology for the Third Millennium” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say it with me: mih-HAY-lee chick-SENT-me-high) has a lot of pretty profound thoughts. This one might seem a little depressing, but bear with me: A rosy-colored picture of human nature cannot stand up to scrutiny for long. Those …
A friend of mine who is a shining example of someone who Does the Work to reflect on and improve his life recently mentioned struggling with “shame spirals”. The term was coined by clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman, who described it as “A triggering event occurs. … a person is suddenly enmeshed in shame, the eyes …
It’s one of the bitter silver linings of the current political climate: a lot of people suddenly find themselves in a similar situation to their pop-culture heroes. Suddenly the word “Resistance” is not talking about a Princess-General struggling against an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away – no, instead it’s in the form …