When I was at a beach in San Diego a few weeks ago, my brother asked me if I wanted to go into the ocean.  Thought I knew I would enjoy it, I had this strange — almost reflexive — feeling of reluctance. 

I told him “next time”. 

...

In 2018 I had the opportunity to hear from an interventional cardiologist that is famous in the medical community for his ability to treat complex patient cases that most surgeons wouldn’t think of touching.

When a surgeon-in-training asked him how he was able to make decisions so quickly during surgery,...

Every day is punctuated with moments where you can decide how to respond. 

Every response is an implicit assertion that this (the response you chose) is more valuable than that (the response(s) you didn’t choose). 

For example: 

When a mistake is made, you can choose grace, not...

When I started working 5 years ago, I would shudder in the face of questions that I didn’t have an immediate answer to. 

In my mind, not have the answer at the ready was synonymous with failure. 
I’d have toxic, counterproductive thoughts like: 
“Why can’t you be more prepared?”...

A striving mindset is process-driven instead of output-driven. 

It prizes the race over the finish line, the incline over the peak, the journey over the destination. 

Stanford Neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman, recently shared on his podcast that framing our pursuit of things as a reward in and of...

Worrying can be a good thing. 

Yes, you read that correctly: a good thing. 

When you worry, you tend to pay extra attention. You plan more carefully. You double (or even triple) check your work. 

In situations that are under your control, all of this extra effort...

One of the many traits I admired about my dad was his relentless desire to understand why things were the way that they were. 

As a software engineer, he would rather pour over documentation to solve his coding problems than copy and paste StackOverflow code that he didn’t fully...

“We can be very proud of our achievements last week in Malaysia, but there is no room for complacency”.

Those were the words that Toto Wolff, Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport, told his team after winning their second race in a row in the 2014 Formula 1 Championship Season. 

It’s...

You are not synonymous with your mistakes. 

You are not the typo on your cover letter. 

You are not the innocuous rounding error on your finance report. 

You are not the delay in your project plan. 

You’re human, which means you’re going to occasionally make mistakes. ...

Every so often, you’re going to have one of those days. 

One of those days where you struggle to focus,

where your energy feels lower than usual,

where you can’t seem to muster up the right words no matter how hard you try, 

where the one thing that...