I was at a party recently when someone said to me, “People don’t change much as they age unless they continue to grow as they get older.” In other words, when we stop growing, we become boring. This thought intrigued me, so I did some checking and found out the notion has a great deal…
Rachael Ray recently interviewed Jennifer Lopez on her television talk show. When Rachel asked Jennifer how she was able to deal with all the criticism that went along with being a star, she gave a very confident and impressive answer. She said, “Know who you are, stay true to that and try to get better.” …
Recently while sitting in a physician’s waiting room, I picked up an issue of Newsweek magazine. The cover story was an article written by Sharon Begley about the things we can do to make our brains work better. The article covered the gamut of subjects like what vitamins, foods, drugs and mental exercises might possibly…
In 1921, Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University began a long-term study of 1,528 twelve year old American children. The goal of this project was to study their lives and habits until they died. Recently, Howard Friedman, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California Riverside and Leslie Martin, Professor of Psychology…
I grew up in an environment where daydreaming was considered loafing or a waste of time. The prevailing logic was simple: If you were daydreaming, you weren’t working. Recently, while reading Brian Clark’s blog on the web site Lateral Action, I found out that there is sound scientific evidence connecting daydreaming with creativity—people who daydream…
The pursuit of happiness is still alive and well according to an article written by Tammy Brodesser-Akner that appeared in a recent issue of Spirit Magazine. As it turns out, the benefits of happiness are well worth the pursuit. According to the article, there are at least 225 studies which tell us that once you…
Jen Weigel of the Chicago Tribune recently wrote an article about John Kralik, a Los Angeles attorney whose life was in the pits. His law firm was not doing well, he was going through a divorce, living and a cramped apartment and didn’t know how he was going to pay his staff. On January 1,…
A recent study at Brigham Young University, which was reported in journal PLoS Medicine, found that our personal relationships are among the “short list” of factors that predict our odds of living or dying. The study authored by BYU professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith found that “…social connections—friends, family, neighbors or colleagues—improve our odds…
More than 150 years ago, Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness….Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” If we spend all our life in the same place doing the same things with the same…
Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a story about Marissa Mayer who, at age 35, is the youngest person to sit on Google’s operating committee and is also Google’s champion of innovation and design. When asked about her career philosophy, Ms. Mayer mentioned two things: Surround yourself…”with the smartest people who challenge…