The business case for starting with a strong finish.

Studies show that a temporal landmark, like the beginning of a year, can have a strong motivational effect on people’s intentions to pursue their goals. Psychologists call this "the fresh start effect."

But here’s the tricky part.

The reason a fresh start is so motivating is it allows you to disassociate from your past actions and your past imperfect self. Blowing past the year you’ve just lived and what it has to teach you, may lead to another disappointing cycle of wash, rinse, and repeat.

A powerful antidote to a weak start is a strong finish. And a great tool for that is a Personal Year-end Review.

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Links to people and resources referenced in this episode:

Tiago Forte at Blog - Forte Labs and author of Building a Second Brain

Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.

Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results.

How to Enjoy the Ride, Part 3.

So much of navigating life in a way that brings you joy and a feeling of being fully alive is a mental game. It is waking up to the experience of your life for brief moments and then slipping back into autopilot.

In this third and final episode of this series, I share five of my favorite reflective practices for more fully experiencing this remarkable ride called life.

Here are some links to resources I reference in this episode:

Ali Victor Binazir's 2021 article entitled, You, the Miraculous: What Are The Chances of Being Born?

The Last Time, Season 2, episode 12, or read it on The Slow Sip here.

Finally, here is a link to my post, The Shut Down Sequence on The Slow Sip.

How to Enjoy the Ride, Part 2.

In Part 2 of my series, “How to Enjoy the Ride”, I explore some hard truths about our lives that actually make life more worth living.

In this episode, I discuss:

• The two kinds of happiness and how an over focus on one versus the other can make us miserable;
• Cognitive time travel and how we can improve our enjoyment of life by learning to operate our inner time machine;
• How we don’t really matter as much as we think we do and how that is a good thing;
• And finally, how embracing change and the shortness of our time on this planet can actually be liberating.

Here are links to resources I mention in the podcast.

• Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman.
• The meditation app, Waking Up by Sam Harris. This link leads you to a free trial.
• And finally, here is the wonderful essay by Jane Park, called What is the greatest unit of time for living?