It seems like every 10 or 20 years, there’s one breakthrough book in the personal development category. The chronological first of the How-Do-I-Get-There-From-Here? books to help me find my way was Barbara Sher’s Wishcraft. It’s gentle and playful in tone, yet still filled with the kind of useful tools and practical exercises that make a [...]
self-development
Every morning, after ramping up with a mug of weak tea, I have one giant cup of incredibly strong coffee. Almost immediately, I am filled with focused energy, high spirits, and love for my fellow man. Which, even though it’s happened every single day for the past 30 years (give or take the occasional streak [...]
I vastly underestimated my ability to do something “impossible.” And I vastly overestimated my ability to recover from it. * * * * * It is curious, the formless form recovery takes. When I was recovering from my Crohn’s onset nine years ago, there was a constant tension between wanting to leap forward, back into [...]
Once upon a time in a dingy Hollywood studio far, far away, I took my very first acting class.1 I was there because it had been suggested to me by my improv teacher that while my writing was passable, my ability to convey actual human emotion onstage was somewhere between “painful to behold” and “chair”, [...]
I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but when I was a girl, I had a brilliant notion: what if I could have all of the sicknesses of my lifetime at once, rather than having them parceled out here and there, when they were least expected and seldom welcome? Or, because I quickly figured out [...]
I’ve done a handful of interviews for the presentation I’m giving later this week, which has renewed my appreciation for the skill involved in asking the right questions. My previous experience with this valuable journalistic skill has been minimal, but similarly instructive. It took an shockingly long time to draft a set of questions for [...]
I believe in the essential goodness of people. I may forget it here and there, when I’m pressed for time, or not well-rested/-fed/-clothed, or when some deep, emotional trigger gets pulled. But usually, and fairly quickly, I recognize these lapses as such. They’re my (temporary) deviations from an essentially optimistic, basically loving worldview, brought on by [...]
There’s an old saying the creatives in my old ad agency liked to lob at the suits when they started fire-breathing stuff like budgets and time and quality: Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick any two. Actually, we were rarely this articulate or polite under pressure, usually, we used a lot more words, rapid-fire and sotto voce, [...]
There is a truism in acting that you cannot play a villain if you view him as such, because every character is central to his own life story and never, ever sees himself as a villain. The first thing you are supposed to do as a good actor doing responsible script analysis is to comb [...]
In a way, all the things we do to help us get things done are tricks: Carving up our schedules in this way or that. Eating our biggest frogs first. Even accountability is a trick of sorts. If you take on an exercise buddy or join a mastermind group or self-help organization like AA or [...]
