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It was my first job, when I was 14.
I had reached a plateau in my playing and knew I needed some formal lessons. There was no YouTube back then, and the guitar teacher I had for six months when I was e...
You are. Miraculous, that is.
If you are reading or hearing this, you are here, alive and conscious. And that, my friends, is truly a miracle, because there is no rational explanation for it—for you.
I ...
The lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and import our age has not yet begun to comprehend. - C.G. Jung
Ask people to list the most important things in life, and you will typic...
There is no shortage of important discussion topics in the personal transformation/self-improvement/positive psychology world in which I work. My current focus is on helping people who are facing majo...
Everybody wants something; we are hardwired that way. It is human biology; you have powerful dopaminergic reward systems that make you want to progress, to discover, to become; to get what you want.
So...
Ask people what they really want, and you will find that there are two main principles that underlie their initial list of material stuff: love and freedom. Both are important for long-term, sustainab...
I recently got some raised eyebrows from my musical accomplices when I told them I was taking guitar lessons. They know me as a long-time professional guitarist, musician and composer, and a music tea...
NOTE: This article is longer than my usual Mindset Monday posts, but there are a lot of new people coming to the Hardcore Happiness community, and I just (August, 2025, as I write this) launched a Har...
“Tide‘s coming in,” she said.
Looks like it.
He was a bit startled to hear the voice.
As usual, when he looked up, no one was there.
He was still alone here, at the End of All Things.
It had taken a long...
What would increase your well-being and satisfaction? More health? More wealth? Better relationships? Whether you want fame and fortune or just peace and quiet, it all starts with one question: Are yo...
The epistemological debate regarding free will is out of my philosophical wheelhouse; I will leave it to the theologians. But I do know this:
While we don’t choose our genetics or the circumstances of ...
Journitation is a portmanteau I created to highlight the importance of combining journaling and meditation. I believe that the whole of this practice is greater than the sum of its parts.
Journaling
...
I have three nice pens.
One is a Cross that my mother gave me many years ago. I told her, “I’ll write my Ph.D. dissertation with this.” (I did, when I was 29). Another is a Waterman Expert, still in it...
Everyone has a past.
Every past has some moments of triumph and some embarrassments, some great decisions and some regrets. As I have previously written, It is important to remember the people, places,...
I know people who “got old” in their 30s. I have friends who in their mid 80s still carry hundred-pound stacks of bricks to do masonry work, because it interests them and they’re good at it. If you fo...
