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Productive Stress

Working on the Weekend Depends On How You Define Work

“Unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is to work on the weekends,” tweeted a woman named Jordan Kong, who reports working in tech and splitting her time between San Francisco and Miami. “Disagree. Deadlift. Take long walks. Read fiction. Listen to music,” responded yours truly. The truth, of…

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How Boredom Can Lead to Breakthrough

What do you do when you feel bored? There was a time in the past when the answers may have been diverse and varied. Read a book, call a friend, go for a walk, play a game, or if you’re a child, make up an entire adventure. Now, we all inevitably have the same reaction:…

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Money is Not the Best Motivator (Here’s What Is)

Anyone who tells you that money isn’t important is either delusional or has so much money they’ve become blind to how important it actually is. That said, above a certain amount—between 75K and 100K with adjustments in both directions for geography, according to research conducted by the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman—additional money is not…

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When Something that is Supposed to be Easy Feels (Really) Hard

On Thursday, June 22nd, Jim Ryun ran a mile in 4:07. In his training log, he wrote “was hard.” The mile race was the prelims for the AAU National Championship. Ryun had advanced to the final. But as someone who was just a few years removed from gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated when he…

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