Motivation vs. Discipline
/Discipline and motivation got in a fight and it wasn’t even close, discipline won by a mile.
Digital Bankruptcy
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In the final minutes of New Year’s Eve before our family and friends began to arrive at our home to celebrate the new year, I declared digital bankruptcy.
Since a bankruptcy is designed to relieve someone of their financial debts, it was time for me to do that with most of my digital debts.
Over the last few weeks, I have been preparing to get rid of most of my digital debts. These digital debts were nearly all my own making, so I only had myself to blame. But to blame wasn’t my intention. Nor was it to sit with each piece of digital clutter and determine what I was going to do with it. The time for that had passed. I resolved (or removed) many of these digital debts before the last day of the year, but when it came down to it, I was going to trash it one fell swoop.
Read MoreTwin Study - Vegan vs. Omnivore
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Last year, Mike (my identical twin brother) and I, along with 21 other pairs of identical twins participated in a medical study through the Stanford School of Medicine comparing vegan and omnivore diets. Last month, the first study results were published, and in just a few days, the Netflix documentary series about the study, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, premieres.
Read More52
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Contrary to the popular adage, age isn’t “just a number”. Age isn’t just A number. Age is THE number. Quite literally, it might be the most important number of a person’s life. I am 52. If I walked up to you and, absent any context, proclaimed, “Hi, I’m Matt and I’m 52.” There would no doubt to what I was referring. I only get to live this one life, I was born once and I will die once… and aside from quality, age is the scoreboard. We only get to live on this earth for so long, and the goal for most is to have that number be as high as possible.
Read MoreDo a little bit every day...
/It is better to water a damp flowerbed than a dry one.
No Podcasts for Seven Days
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The older I get the more I understand how deep many of the habits of my life are engrained. I quit chewing tobacco a little over a decade ago, much to the satisfaction of my wife, after coming to the realization that it was a habit that negatively impacted my life more than in just the most obvious health related ways. Ever since then, I have worked to be aware of all my habits. The bad ones and the good ones.
I don’t claim to be the first person to listen to a podcast, but shortly after Apple started supporting them in iTunes (who remembers iTunes???) I was hooked. I immediately thought of the potential to have talk radio (a la NPR) on demand. And the medium went on to change my life in so many profound ways. But those are stories for another post.
Read MoreRegrets, I've Had A Few
/I've been posting my thoughts on the internet for 25 years. That’s nearly half my life. The internet was new to us, and we had to go to Radio Shack to buy a very long telephone extension chord to go from our house to the little in-laws quarters in our backyard where we put the computer.
Read MoreThe One Where I Mourn the Actor I Never Even Watched
/I have never seen an episode of Friends. Ever.
Well, actually one time, in very early 2018, I was at our daughter’s house, and she had Friends on in the background… but I swear I never watched it. I was just aware that it was on.
For some strange reason, I’ve worn the “never watched Friends” badge with pride, as if I deserved some stupid medal for it.
Read MoreNostalgia, Now, Novelty
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File this under “things I heard on a podcast a long time ago and can’t get it out of my head”. Nostalgia was once thought of as a disease. After hearing the episode of Hidden Brain on this topic, I couldn’t stop thinking of the idea of nostalgia as an illness.
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