A friend of mine who owns his own painting business highly recommended the book, The E-Myth, so I had to check it out. I’m not quite through it yet, but already it’s changed the way I think about business and taught me many things I’ll be certainly apply throughout my career.

Perhaps the most powerful idea in the book (and one that is relevant to PTB) is the necessity of having direction in your life before you can create it in your business. This passage in particular resonated with me:

Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day.

They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.

Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intend to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.

They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.

I believe it’s true that the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.

The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.

The difference between the two is living intentionally and living by accident.

Are you living intentionally? For most of my life I wasn’t. I was waiting for life to find me. For my talent and passion to jump out and grab me. But it didn’t and it won’t. You have to find it for yourself.

Once you cross this barrier (and no one can do it for you), the life you desire starts falling place.

Sitting in front of a computer for hours on end with minimal movement is not what nature had in mind when she designed our bodies. Limited movement day in day out effects our posture, energy levels, body, eyes and muscle tone.

A sluggishness sets in. Bodily needs get ignored such as thirst and hunger not to mention the aches, twitches and pains that start appearing from prolonged sitting and restricted movement. Your eyes, back and legs are probably craving for some variation and blood flow stimulation.

I certainly spend hours and hours writing and working in front of my computer but due the complaints of my body I have needed to develop a few healthy habits and mini workouts to give my body the attention it deserves.

Sure I do yoga and walk on the beach most days, but long stretches on the computer definitely require some mindful additions during computer time. The following are some ideas I hope will inspire you to add a few mindful healthy living habits to your hours spent in front of your computer.

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My post from a couple weeks back on the beauty of sadness opened up a great discussion about the difference between sadness and depression and the merits of accepting sadness vs. treating it with prescription drugs.

On a very related note, I recently came across an interesting article on the tendancy of unhappiness in intelligence people. The author (a sociologist) claims that unhappiness develops in childhood, primarily because of Western cultures lack of esteem for intellectual values.

Children develop along four streams: intellectual, physical, emotional (psychological) and social. In classrooms, the smartest kids tend to be left out of more activities by other children than they are included in. They are “odd,” they are the geeks, they are social outsiders. In other words, they do not develop socially as well as they may develop intellectually or even physically where opportunities may exist for more progress.

Their emotional development, characterized by their ability to cope with risky or stressful situations, especially over long periods of time, also lags behind that of the average person.

Adults tend to believe that intelligent kids can deal with anything because they are intellectually superior. This inevitably includes situations where the intelligent kids have neither knowledge nor skills to support their experience. They go through the tough times alone. Adults don’t understand that they need help and other kids don’t want to associate with kids the social leaders say are outsiders.

Interesting stuff, although I’m not sure I completely agree. It’s nice to know that if you’re prone to the occasional bad mood, it’s only because you’re too smart to be happy.

Interview for The Happiness Project

Also, if you’re interested in checking out more of my thoughts on happiness, I recently did an interview with Alex Shalman for his series, The Happiness Project. If you have moment, leave a comment. The interviewee with the most comments wins $200 for charity.

You can really feel the difference a genuine conversation makes. I’ve left some talks feeling invigorated with new ideas. Others I have left feeling that I’ve just lost twenty minutes of my life that I will never get back. So how do you create more meaningful conversations and avoid the small talk that drains life away?

Although there are a lot of elements that go into a good conversation, I’ve found that there are only two rules that are extremely important:
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