Personal Development Blog For Living Your Full Potential

By Leo Babauta I was talking with a client about how he felt constantly behind on his email, Slack and other messages and small tasks. I suggested having regular times to do those things: 15 minutes in the morning and evening each for email and Slack (for a total of 30 minutes, twice a day), for example. He laughed and said, “Leo, I’ve tried that a thousand times and it hasn’t stuck!” I totally get it. We’ve tried to form some powerful habits, and they work for a little bit, until they fall off. But we can always come back. In fact, coming back to a habit might be the most powerful habit of all. Coming back, over and over again, just like we return to the breath, over and over again, after letting our minds wander. It’s the nature of our minds to fall off habits. Sometimes it takes a dozen attempts before it really clicks. Sometimes more. Falling off the habit isn’t a problem — it’s just a part of the experience of shifting patterns. The problem is that we think we should never ...

In this episode, we discuss something that’s very important for leadership—public speaking. Many leaders—probably most—are terrified of doing it. Unfortunately, as a leader, you really can’t avoid it. 

As you get older, learning often feels harder than it used to. Why is that? What changes in the brain as we age that makes acquiring new information harder? Is there anything we can do to avoid our minds slowing down? This is a topic I’ve been asked about a lot, but until recently one that I didn’t know much about. Aging wasn’t a topic I spent much time researching in my book, preferring to focus on principles of learning that are universal. Recently, however, I decided to dig into some of the research on cognitive aging to see how our learning is impacted by getting older. Learning Slows with Age The first clear finding is that the feeling that one is getting slower mentally as we age is not an illusion—countless studies reinforce the fact that most aspects of mental processing get worse as we age: 1 Interestingly, not all aspects of thinking get worse with age. Accumulated knowledge of the world increases until nearly the end of our lives, as you can see in the figure above w...

Customers, Bosses, Boards, and Investors Matter—But They Can’t Come First Some leaders believe that customers are their most important priority. Others believe their boss, their board, or their investors are their most important priority. I’ve worked in companies where these philosophies were the cultural norm. But I don’t agree with them. I believe your teammates are your most important priority . If you take care of them, they will take care of everything else. “ In business, your team takes priority. Take care of them and they’ll take care of the rest. —MICHAEL HYATT Why should your team be your top priority? Different people will have different reasons, but these three are foundational for understanding how business really works, and how companies can win big if they remember who comes first and why. Without your team, you would have no product. You may have a killer idea, but practically no business is truly a one-person show. However you define you...

By Leo Babauta The truth is, most of us have a pretty adversarial relationship to time. There’s never enough. We’re always behind. It goes by too fast. We can’t do important things because we don’t have enough time. None of it is helpful. Most of it is bullshit. Let’s take the first one: there’s never enough time. This is powerful because there’s some truth to it: time is limited and precious. We will die, and while we don’t know how much time we have left in this life, we do know that it’s limited. It’s helpful to remember that we must make the most of our limited time! But time is also abundant. Think of the past few years — it might seem like they passed really quickly, but actually we had so many hours we can’t can’t them. We had a huge abundance of hours. Maybe we didn’t spend them wisely (I know I misspent quite a few hours), but we had plenty of time. We still do, today and this month and this year. The key is to see this abundance, and feel it in your body. It’s like the ...

Leaders are expected to have all the answers. But sometimes they need to get insight from other leaders to stay on top of their game. In this episode, we reached out to our Instagram audience for their most pressing questions for Michael and Megan. They bring practical solutions to the problems many leaders face, based on more than 30 years of business experience.

Normally when I talk about learning quickly , I’m using speed as a synonym for efficiency. Use more effective methods and you’ll learn more in less time. All else being equal, that means you’re learning faster. Today, however, I want to consider a different meaning for speed: how quickly should you try to do things in order to improve performance. One way to imagine this is to look at something like chess. Chess can be played at different speed levels: you could play tournament-length games, which take hours. You could play blitz, which has only a few minutes, or bullet chess where moves are counted in seconds. If your goal were to improve at chess, which kind should you make your core practice? Speed and Transfer The first thing to consider is that often what we think of as a single skill is actually different skills when viewed from different timeframes. Consider solving a math problem. You can painstakingly calculate an exact answer. Or you can ballpark it using some guessi...

Leaders Affect Organizational Culture (Whether They Like it Or Not) My dad was injured in the Korean War, a few years before I was born. Because of that injury, he walks with a limp to this day. As a young boy, I unconsciously emulated him. I just thought that was the way grown men walked. When I was three or four, I remember Mom saying to me, “Michael, you don’t need to walk with a limp. Dad walks that way because he was hurt in the war.” I still walked that way for another year or so, simply because I wanted to be like my dad. Law, in replicate This was the “law of replication” in action. This law says that like begets like. Dogs beget dogs. Trees beget trees. And people beget people. This law also applies to leadership. If you are a leader, like it or not, you will replicate yourself. Your followers will adopt your behaviors and habits. If you have a strong personality, they may even mimic your mannerisms without meaning to do so because of the human brain’s mirror system. Th...

By Leo Babauta Our lives are pervaded with addictions and distractions. Social media, shopping, favorite websites and video services, alcohol, cigarettes, biting nails, porn, drugs, sweets, fried foods, soda, coffee, gambling, gaming, workaholism, complaining, avoiding, procrastinating, perfectionism, fantasizing, rationalizing, self-hating, sex addiction, drama addiction. These addictions are some of the most common ways we have of soothing ourselves when we’re stressed or feeling bad about ourselves or others. When we’re feeling anxiety, insecurity, depression, anger, sadness, pain. When we’re feeling overwhelmed, bad about ourselves, self-doubt, uncertainty, discomfort. We sooth ourselves with our addictions, until it feels like we can’t stop. The first step to dealing with the addiction, of course, is to recognize that it’s a problem. I remember rationalizing for years why it was OK for me to smoke cigarettes. And to overeat. And to procrastinate. So many rationalizations! It ...

We don’t know anybody who loves interpersonal conflict. It’s uncomfortable, and it brings up a ton of negative emotions. Most of us try to avoid conflict whenever possible. Even as a leader, you may wonder, “Do I really have to have this hard conversation?”