Perfectionism and Exercise Fascinating New York Times blog post on exercising. Turns out perfectionism is a barrier to many people's getting in shape. Specifically:    "One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing ...

A friend/activist recently wrote to me about the difficulties she has building "rewards" (fun, pleasure, validation, gratification, treats, etc.) into her life. She mentioned that a day trip that was supposed to be a big reward for her last month fizzled, and that made her very demoralized. This is a ...

Interesting New York Times article on how we tend to remember rejections and criticism much longer than praise. Absolutely true! Most underproductivity is catalyzed by toxic rejections that the person retains years, and even decades, later. Excerpts: "The human brain handles negative and positive input differently, psychologists say, which is ...

Often, we think we need to take big steps to boost our productivity, but here are four small steps that can have a big impact: 1. Specialize More Invest as much of your time as possible in your "high value activities": those that (1) are within your mission, (2) leverage ...

Interesting article by Daniel Gulati in Harvard Business Review on why people have trouble quitting even jobs and businesses they hate. Everything he writes would apply to activist campaigns, too, and probably relationships and other areas of life. The author neglects to mention, though, that timing a quit is hard. ...

    Artist Corii Rowell, whom I met at Boskone, did this ubercute robot version of Barry Deutsch's cartoon for my book cover!    

So far in March, Kindle sales of my book The 7 Secrets of the Prolific are triple what they were in February--and it's only the fourth full month in print. Paperback sales also rising! So excited. I'm hearing from readers in the U.S., Canada, England, Poland, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere! ...

Procrastination isn’t laziness, lack of discipline, lack of willpower, etc.: it’s disempowerment. Disempowerment means you aren’t missing anything, but lacking access to that which you have. Remove or heal from the disempowering forces in your work and life and you’ll “automagically” recover all the energy, discipline, willpower, etc., you thought ...