Personal Development Blog For Living Your Full Potential

By Leo Babauta We spend our days filling in every available space, cramming in more tasks, responding to messages, checking social media and online sites, watching videos. We are afraid of empty space in our lives. The result is often a continual busyness, constant distraction and avoidance, lack of focus, lack of satisfaction with our lives. We run from silence. We run from the spaces between tasks and appointments. We run from solitude and stillness. We try to fill every second with activity, with something useful, as if silence and space are not valuable. But what are we afraid of? And who would we be if we didn’t have that fear? We’re afraid of space and stillness and silence because it highlights the uncertainty, instability, groundlessness, insecurity, shakiness that lie underneath every second of our lives. We’re afraid of having to face this instability and uncertainty, of having to feel the fear of it. Without the fear of all of the uncertainty that is highlighted by s...

Many leaders compensate for feeling overwhelmed and over-busy by working even more hours. But neglecting self-care puts us on a downward spiral that leads to lower productivity and, ultimately, burnout. In this episode, Michael and Megan share the secret weapon for boosting productivity—a hobby!

Learning to Embrace a Hobbyist’s Mediocrity The Wharton-educated bank executive quits weekend bird-watching excursions after missing a prothonotary warbler (rare orange and yellow-headed songbird) sighting. The tenured physics professor storms out of the kitchen because her batch of gazpacho soup turned out a tad too peppery. First-world problems, to be sure. But they’re also the type of increasingly common complaints hyper-accomplished professionals make when their hobbies and passion projects don’t result in the level of quality and polish they’re accustomed to in the work world. Many high-achievers find these “shortcomings” tough to stomach because they’ve seamlessly risen to the top strata of American professional society. Yet when it comes to weekend and evening hobbies, they’re sometimes less than perfect. And that’s ok—or at least it should be. High achievers need not give up on or decline to pursue hobbies just because they won’t be great at them. They ought to get over...

Where Win-Win Comes From As a kid who wasn’t allowed to watch television, the focus of my childhood was play. The games are too many to count. There was, for example, a little girl who lived in mirrorland and would possess me if I accidentally touched that shiny, reflective surface at night. She scared the heck out of my little sisters. Today, they say they knew all along it was a game, but I like to believe I had them fooled. For better or worse, play changes when you’re an adult. I rarely engage in open-ended, exploratory, pretend-play. I can’t remember the last time I had a truly epic, long-lasting daydream. Even more regimented play, like board games, has become the exception instead of the rule. Though it would be unrealistic to maintain play as a focus in adulthood, research increasingly points to the benefits of a playful spirit. Mirrorland may just get an encore. Play and creativity Mozart enjoyed pranks, Einstein’s most famous photograph includes his arched tongue, and t...

Painting Helped Him Beat Depression, and Nazi Germany Winston Churchill once wrote that “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance”. He knew this well. Even as he warned the world about the threat of totalitarian regimes and led Britain during the Second World War, the statesman crafted many of his more than 500 oil paintings, capturing scenes from everywhere he traveled. For Churchill, taking up brush and easel helped him find respite from the many struggles he had with both his career and his clinical depression. Painting also helped him hone his considerable oratorical skills. He brought the attention to detail he used in his oils to his many speeches. Churchill’s experience with painting reminds all of us that we should not simply preoccupy our minds with only our careers and personal obligations. Taking up a hobby not only helps you find relief from stress, it can even help you become better in your life at work and home. ...

By Leo Babauta Many people I know are on a quest to optimize their lives — some of my favorite people in the world will spend days trying to perfect a productivity system, get things automated, or find the perfect software for anything they’re doing. They are on a continual search for the perfect diet, the perfect work routine, the perfect travel setup. Optimizing can take quite a bit of time and energy. What would happen if we let go of optimizing? Who would we be without the idea that we should optimize everything? One idea is that if we decided not to optimize everything, we’d stop caring, stop trying to make things better, and live suboptimal lives. But I know myself pretty well — I will always care, even if I am not trying to optimize. I will always do my best, which is different than optimizing — it’s taking care and giving love, even if things aren’t optimized. I believe most of you are this way, pouring your hearts into something with pure love, without needing to make ever...

Now's the Time to Stop Wasting Time You already know that busywork does nothing more than create the perception that people are working harder than they really are. In fact, 65 percent of your colleagues surveyed by Havas Worldwide felt that people were simply pretending to be busy. Nor does busywork make you or your company more productive. What you get instead are weekly meetings that generate more doodles than productive activity, reports that provide little more than clutter for hard drives and desks, and “urgent requests” that suck time away from actual goal achievement. Yet busywork remains a problem for most workplaces. This is a legacy passed on by management scientists who fostered the kind of micromanaging that leads to busywork. Add in the reality that work cultures often prioritize looking busy over being productive. It is little wonder that busywork continues to plague us. The consequence of micromanagement You know all too well the scenes from Office Space in ...

Why It's so Compelling and How to Quit Hi, my name is Larry, and I’m an addict. I’ve been clean and sober for three years, two months, and eight days. My drug of choice was not alcohol, narcotics, or even nicotine. For decades, I was addicted to fake work. I spent hours formatting spreadsheets. I immersed myself in fact finding excursions, spending huge chunks of time at bookstores and office supply centers, obsessing over a $50 purchase. I spent countless hours in conference rooms, discussing options. I filed reports with meticulous attention to detail, and I checked email constantly, even after business hours. Worse, I answered every message. I took lunch meetings most weekdays, even some weekends. I looked forward to returning to the office to hear, “There’s someone here to see you.” I was busy, far too busy, doing work that didn’t need to be done. It all felt so productive. But all this busyness squeezed my most important tasks, my real work, into the margins. Despite al...