Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World
Anika reached out to me earlier this year asking to participate in the AWP Reader Experiments challenge I advertised earlier this year. As a 22-year old graduate student in Pune, India, she felt that she needed ancient wisdom to help her with a few things most of us struggle with: anxiety, procrastination, and a shortage
We have all taken personality tests before. At work, your company have made you take the Myers-Briggs personality test in order to teach you how to effectively communicate and work with other people. Or you might have taken a less serious personality test like the “Which Disney Princess are you?” At best, you received some
I ran an experiment yesterday with my ice bath. I did my usual routine first (two bags of ice, 20 minutes in the water), but then instead of running around like a crazy person in my apartment trying to warm up, I decided to take a warm shower right after the bath to see if
I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test in college for a class on leadership and management. The test is supposed to determine what your psychological preferences are: whether you are introverted or extroverted, whether you follow your hunches or prefer to look at details and facts, or make decisions based on logic and reason or
I consider myself to be a fairly rational and analytical person. This mode of thinking is useful for making many decisions, but not all of them. This is the problem Russ Roberts tackles in his book, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. As an economist, Roberts’ default mode it to tackle
Earlier this year I offered readers the opportunity to take on a customized ancient wisdom projects that would help them explore or address an issue or problem they were interested in. Several courageous readers took me up on the offer and I am in the process of turning their experiences into case studies. Lara offers
My previous post outlined the reasons why most of the modern personal development (PD) advice is generally terrible, which begs the question, how and where can we find good advice? By avoiding sources of advice that have the same weaknesses as the PD genre, we stumble on ancient wisdom. To give some background if you
A few months ago I read the excellent book Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. The author, Matthew Crawford, examines the nature of work, what it can teach us, and why the crafts (loosely defined as manual trades) are significantly more satisfying and enriching than the typical office job. I decided
Over the past six weeks or so, I’ve adopted Hindu practices to understand more about myself. I took a few minutes every morning to pay my respects to the Hindu god, Ganesh, I suffered through 90 minute hot yoga sessions, and I read important Hindu scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gita and selections from the Upanishads.
I live in the DC area and one topic that inevitably comes up is career. Depending on the crowd, you’ll hear about the people still figuring what they want to do for real (while they work as government consultants), people who are trying to figure out the next step in their career, and others who