When bees fly out to find food for their hive, they don’t always make it back. They can get fatigued, sometimes to the point where they are unable to keep going. If this happens, they simply wait to die. I found one such bee on a windowsill. Immobile, unable to respond with more than slight twitches of its legs when provoked. I gave it liquid honey. It drank for several minutes, rested for half an hour and left....
Giving is scary. A creeping fear lingers, always, that what you’ve got is not enough. That your gift will not be well received. The fear persists across so many domains. Contributing to group projects, starting a business, giving presents, personal relationships, community participation, leadership. Fear gets in the way of generosity. The desire to contribute is in constant combat with the reptilian thought that your contribution will be deemed unworthy....
I operate at least one order of magnitude better when I’m on a roll. I suspect this is true to varying degree among most people. The effect is similar to confirmation bias, or faking-it-until-you-make-it – being on a roll is a story, one that’s hard to diverge from once I’ve entered into the core narrative. Conversely, just as momentum describes the relationship between an object’s mass and velocity, inertia describes the energy it takes to accelerate or decelerate said object....
Do you speak a language that less than 1000 people know? I speak at least 2. I have a unique set of words that only my girlfriend and I understand. Anyone else would have a hard time working out what goes on in a conversation between us. At work, my team and extended team has a similar, but smaller vocabulary. These languages give us power. They demarcate a group. They show us that we’re inside the boundary of that group....
Guilt and fulfilment are somewhat opposite feelings that pull in the same direction. They are the carrot and stick of doing what seems subjectively right. Guilt when you fail, and indulge in something that seems wrong. Fulfilment when you succeed in doing what seems right. And then there are two feelings that can easily hijack behaviour, because on the surface they seem so close to guilt and fulfilment. These are shame and pleasure....