Personal Development with Gray Miller
Monday night I was continuing my journey into learning visually by attending a life-drawing class at a nearby community center. I’ve mainly been using charcoals and pencils for that kind of sketching, but I have a nifty new portable watercolor set that I was planning on breaking out for the first time. So, with all …
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 …
In the rush to be more productive, to be more successful, to be more…whatever it is we’re trying to be more of…it’s easy enough to forget about the why in pursuit of the what. Case in point: I’ve been trying for a few years to get better at sketchnoting. In a time when I was …
I’m happy to see that the word “passion” making a comeback. It fell out of favor for a while, and was even ridiculed in self-help circles, because the idea of “following your passion seemed to be a one-way ticket to being a penniless hobbyist living in your friend’s garage. However, people like Angela Duckworth started …
As I write this, I’m growing a tree. Not literally, of course. There’s this nifty little app called “Forest” that has a pretty fun twist on the whole “focus time” method. It’s kind of a productivity Tamagotchi, in that you set an amount of time – say, 25 minutes – and you hit “start”. A …
My friend Michele Serchuk, a New York photographer, was talking with me about a new project of hers involving “modern fairy tales”. We were thinking of the ways that moral lessons were conveyed through the classic stories, and what modern lessons might be useful. One in particular that came to mind was the idea of spreading …
This is going to be an intensely personal post. Three short memories: 1. Sitting on the couch with Natasha, both of us in tears, shaking with anger, hurt, wondering why we were in this place again. We taught workshops on communication and love and conflict resolution, but between us there was a cycle of fights that we …
I hope you all (well, all U.S. readers, anyway) had a lovely Labor Day weekend! I certainly did, visiting a friend in Chicago and eating some delicious food and reveling in not working. This post is not a day late; I simply chose to celebrate Labor Day as it should be – by not laboring. It was also …
I am not a tremendously logical man. I wish I was; it's probably part of why statistics thrill me so much. It's taken me a while, but there was always something about the whole If you follow your passion, you're very unlikely to be happy or successful because you'll be financially insecure argument. With the …
Welcome back! After a (supposedly) much-deserved vacation in San Francisco, the blog is back, I’m back…and I’m discouraged. I am not terribly good at this vacation thing. It…confuses me. Part of it is because I live pretty hand-to-mouth. My concept of “paid vacation” is going somewhere that I can do some work with maybe the …