Best Articles to Change Your Life

Unlike my self-improvement podcast Evolve Faster, this website is new. So I have compiled, updated, and edited a small collection of my previous work to get things going. Specifically, these articles take on the big challenges of learning how to change your life.

  • (5/15/2015) How to Free Your Mind — This transcription (from my TEDx Talk) is good place to start as it’s the idea that started me down this path. The focus of the talk is about considering a wholesale reevaluation of how you use your time. The driving question here was, “who is really in control of your life?” The article uses several science-based findings about distraction addiction to build a case that your most valuable resource is up for auction to the highest bidder.
  • (12/4/2018) Change Your Life (or Die Drying) — Every day, you wake up with the ability to take several high-stakes gambles: change the world, change yourself or do nothing. The problem is you’re most likely on auto-pilot and not consciously aware that these three core options are always right at your fingertips. So instead, you will likely take another step into the comfortable yet dark cave of dissatisfaction. But what if things were different? What if all it took to make a change in life was a simple push of a button? Would you do it knowing a simple motion could change everything, at the cost that it would also plunge you into the great unknown?

Change Your Mindset

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Create a Life Philosophy

I’ve also been producing original content on my Evolve Faster philosophy podcast for the last two years. I’m likely going to publish the text of these as articles as I find the time. But since they’re relevant to the goals of this website too, here is a representative text clip from those episodes and the title link to the audio version. Hope you find some use in this list of article topics covered from a curated set of episodes:

  • (12/10/2019) Flow, Creative Improvisation and other Altered States of Consciousness — “Creativity is not a gift given to a select few. It is a difficult-to-master, acquired skill that develops through consistent practice. You simply have to show up every day and do the work, even when it feels like there is nothing good in your head. Eureka moments of creative genius are a result of consistency and practiced creativity, not some divine gift.”
  • (11/26/2019) Where Creativity Comes From and How to Find Your Uniquely Bloody Fingerprint — “Most of us spend a good portion of the ‘down time’ of our lives admiring great artists and the amazing life their creativity allows for them. Yet most finish listening to some great music, watching a fantastic film or admiring a piece of art, we go back to our reality of a cold/unimaginative job; a life mostly of consuming other people’s creativity, not creating. This is because most believe creativity isn’t a possibility for them.”
  • (11/12/2019) Pyrrhic Victory and Finding the 10% of Your Mind that Defines Who You Are — “Although we hate failure in the moment, studies reveal many people have a positive outlook when reflecting on past mistakes. Take something as your first breakup — perhaps trivial today, but wasn’t then. Ask yourself: how do you feel now? You might be indifferent; or you might think positively about it because you learned that love isn’t easy. But it’s unlikely you’ll feel the same pain as you did back then.”
  • (10/29/2019) Cryptocurrencies Gaming and Leveraging Failure to Help Us Define Who We Are — “Society has lied to you. You live in a world where you’re always searching for a good life; but what you’re told to strive for is a false idol. You work hard, rarely managing to obtain what you’re so desperately seeking. You’re misled by the media and modern culture to think you need all sorts of things—buying products you don’t need, spending money you don’t have—to be satisfied. And this conditions you to cheat in life, or quit trying, because you can’t possibly fulfill all these fake needs and desires dictated to you by people and companies that all want something from you.”
  • (10/15/2019) On Perfection the AI Alignment Problem and Possibility of Quantum Leaps of Creativity — “Finding perfection is like trying to finding the biggest number – you can always go one higher. What is infinity plus one? The same applies to perfection, how can we define something if we can’t even locate it? Or maybe perfection does exist but it isn’t what we imagine it to be. Perhaps when everything is in perfect harmony — when there’s literally nothing more in the universe to evolve further — what should we call that? Heaven? No, because then we will just want to know what heaven plus one looks like!”
  • (10/1/2019) The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Creativity — “To understand deep learning algorithms and their similarity to a human mind, imagine them as a black box created by us. The freedom of learning has brought the AI to the level where even the developers don’t understand how and what ‘mental models’ it has developed. The machine gets smarter by facing issues and gathering experience. They’re developing unique systems of creative thinking where the machine collects information, learns from it, and then makes a prediction or a decision. Sound familiar?”
  • (9/24/2019) Mind Control Through a Well Chosen Tattoo and the Unlikely Case of Being Happy Enough — “Is there a moment where we are happy enough?” It sounds absurd, but it’s a very real question you should ask yourself. You wanted the job, you got it. You wanted the family, you got it. You wanted the house, you got it. When is happy enough? Or is it the striving itself for the next thing? Just asking yourself this question is a great thought experiment. And how can you measure happiness? By tracking your average daily time we smile? So if you smile about 2 hours per day on average, are you happy enough? Perhaps you should tally every time you laugh or smile all day? Is there an app for that?”
  • (9/17/2019) Dharma Modifying Negative Thinking and the Never Ending Pursuit of Happiness by Embracing Suffering — “Although poets and psychologists have traditionally been the dominant force when it comes to the study and management of feelings, more recently, other branches of science have a deep interest in as well. The Western world, at least, is somewhat obsessed with the idea of ‘finding or creating happiness’ in their lives. Where there’s market demand, there will be money; and where there’s money, there’s research.”
  • (9/10/2019) Emotional Manipulation Tribalism and Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Think Before you Feel — “In Western culture, we can certainly see similarities in why people meditate or do CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). Both are mental health remedies sharing a common thread — they’re exercises for your mind leveraging neuroplasticity and the slow, deliberate rewiring of bad habits and negative thought loops. The obvious difference are their origins. While the earliest forms of meditation come from Hinduism (and a bit later Buddhism and Taoism), CBT is rooted in cognitive and behavioral psychology. One originates in spirituality, the other in science”.
  • (9/3/2019) Waging War Between Reason and Emotions and the Importance of Leaving Things Unresolved — “Even though research shows us that emotions are required to make decisions, they often suck at the job. But would life would be easier if we only had positive emotions? Perhaps easier, but it wouldn’t be better. Have you wondered why you feel depressed, angry or anxious? Without training, we rarely stop to think to consider the function behind these negative emotions, same as there is a purpose for physical pain. When somebody hits you, it hurts. Pain — physical as much as emotional — is here to tell you something deeper is wrong that needs your attention.”
  • (8/27/2019) Drugs, Consciousness Manipulation and Cheating Your Way To a Better You — “There’s a quote by Oscar Wilde from Dorian Grey which said, ‘I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them and to dominate them.’ The goal isn’t to remove emotions — which is impossible unless you have the very rare mental wiring of a psychopath — but to understand and control them. Deep emotional responses are a primal reflexes that get colored by our life experiences. Faced with a conflict, you might run away and then feel bad because you didn’t have the bravery to stand firm. But someone else might do the same, then feel happy because she didn’t get hurt. The takeaway is, emotions are extremely hard to control or interpret without training.”
  • (8/20/2019) Who are You and is it Possible to Upgrade Your Identity as an Adult — “This leads to the bigger topic of ‘rewriting your story.’ Almost like making a systematic practice of creating our identity. We are like plants that need light to grow. But, it’s likely many of us were planted in a spot that doesn’t have enough light for us to grow. If we want to achieve Kierkegaard’s ‘self which truly is,’ it’s necessary to forcibly inch ourselves towards the light. But for most of us, it goes against what we think is possible; in other words, yet another narrative is preventing us from writing the best story for ourselves.”
  • (8/13/2019) The Impossibility of Honest Politicians and Protecting Our Kids from The Most Insidious Fake News — “In the end, the best remedy sounds most generic; but perhaps the simple guide you need is love. Queue the Beatles. But seriously, give this a try — being cliché doesn’t mean it’s without value to consider it. Love is the cure to every awful thing life throws at us. In this context, if we love our kids, we will help them develop better bullshit detectors. It will help them see thru the rhetoric and propaganda all around them every day, including in the corporate marketing. It will help them think for themselves, even when that means they might see things differently than us. Love is also simply paying attention and listening for problems before they manifest in bad ways.”
  • (8/6/2019) The Power of Propaganda and Rhetoric to Divide Us and the Quest for a Better World — “Does the average person even understand what critical thinking is and how to use it to protect against well-crafted rhetoric? But upon further reflection, this is a colossal task for any single person on an internet that has billions of pages of content. Just imagine how many news sources you have to check daily to get to the absolute truth, if such a thing exists. It would be a full-time job.”
  • (7/30/2019) Is Less Really More When it Comes to the Pursuit of Wisdom or is Ignorance Bliss — “There is some neuroscience research showing that information overload is reducing our capacity to think clearly, creatively and critically. It’s become a pillar of 21st Century human nature to process as much as possible by consuming information at one point and then regurgitating it out on social media for another person to consume. I suppose that would make Facebook a global, digital vomitorium.“
  • (7/23/2019) Scaling Mount Wisdom Without Suffocating Under an Avalanche of Ego — “Wisdom is the product of applied knowledge, experiences and time. So isn’t the entire arc of our lives really just pursuit of wisdom? On your death bed, are you going to look back at life jazzed about how many articles you stuffed in your brain, Instragram posts you consumed or Netflix shows you digested? Or would you prefer to look back proud of the wise worldview you earned (and hopefully found some way to pass on)? But with information levels reaching overload, and the quality in decline, are we actually gaining wisdom as individuals anymore? How about as a species?”
  • (7/16/2019) Defeating Fake News and Critical Thinking as the Superpower the World Needs Most — “Since it’s highly improbable the information volumes will stop growing, we have a serious problem on our hands. In fact, if the volumes slow it will mean worse news for humanity, because that will mean what you’re being shown is even more cherry-picked by the big tech companies based on what their AI ‘thinks’ you should be seeing. In other words, confirmation and availability bias mainlined right into your neural networks.”
  • (7/9/2019) Should Lying be Made Illegal and the Importance of Figuring Out Why You Believe What you Believe — “Critical thinking doesn’t always lead you easily to a better version of the truth, but it is the best framework of bullshit detection that exists. You want to have the skeptical rigor of a professional fact checker, but still be open minded to any possibility.  When you realize the nuance required to develop a genuinely good opinion, you become a little wiser — and don’t speak much — as you realize your opinion carries less weight. And I think that’s more of the balance we all need to aim for, don’t you think?”
  • (6/18/2019) The Mystical Allure of Converting to Buddhism and Speculating about Quantum Mechanics — “In Western society, Buddhism feels like an alternative worldview; the freshness of it is alluring. Secular Buddhism doesn’t require you to believe in much of anything other than accepting the power of you mind to make you suffer. Buddhism is definitely a much more philosophical approach to having a spiritual, introspective side. For example, one upside of the mindfulness movement is that it’s produced a lot of useful research. There’s now a lot of proof that meditation can reduce stress and bring peace to one’s mind.”
  • (6/11/2019) What Am I Supposed To Do Free Will and Other Everyday Problems — “Philosophy and religion have debated this question ad nauseum and to no clear conclusion. Let’s summarize a common religious position as an example. God has a plan and works in mysterious way (i.e. you don’t have free will), but you’re a sinner and you must repent for your actions (i.e. you have free will). Confused? You should be! But what if it doesn’t matter if we actually have free will? What if all that matters is the perception that we do? That conscious feeling of free will — which leverages our earned and powerful subconscious database of life experiences — is what allows us to live with a sense of purpose and a sense of being in control, however fabricated it may be.“

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