This Graphic Shows What Stress Does to Your Body

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This Graphic Shows What Stress Does to Your Body

http://time.com/

Americans need to relax.

Over 40% of people in the U.S. say they are not doing enough to manage their stress, and the consequences of that could lead to all sorts of health-related problems. A recent study published in the journal Neuron showed people who are stressed have more difficulty with self-control and are more likely to choose to eat unhealthy food. If you’re like many Americans, you often be stressed about work and money, but there are good reasons to take time out of your day to relax. Here’s some examples of how stress affects your entire body.

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5 Mistakes You Will Regret in Your Lifetime

MoneyMax.ph

 

 

Life is short as they say and as much as possible, we all want to make it positive and worth-living. At that, we didn’t mean a life that is something perfect and flawless but a life filled with lessons and moments to cherish for a lifetime.

Committing mistakes is essential for us to experience and appreciate bigger things. Things will never be the same as it is for you now if you did not go wrong at some point in your life. BUT, some mistakes are purely mistakes and surely unavoidable. Here are some:

 

1. Settling on a ‘secured’ job

All of us have different kinds of need when it comes to employment. Common Filipinos work for money, some wants to be employed for compliance with the rules of society to be employed, while some choose to be employed for self-fulfilment.

If you’re going to observe, the common scenario in a usual office setting is: going to work, lunch, snack, and then, go home – every day – doing the same thing. Some don’t mind this kind of setting as long as they’re earning – that’s wrong – because you’ll easily get tired of what you’re doing. You will not enjoy the job and worse, it’s harder to be productive. Don’t settle for this, because it has no long-term effect in your existence and self-appreciation. Don’t you like a job that will give you the power to change something?
 

 

2. Not travelling

Haven’t you heard about “Piso” fares, all these cheap flights and all-in travel promotions? If not, plug in your computer apply for an internet connection, you’ll see these travel promos everywhere. When you have a credit card, it’s much easier to do these things because of online purchasing and differed payment. Maximize this opportunity to explore parts of the country and the world. Travelling gives you a better perspective on things – learning new languages, fitting into a culture and meeting different kinds of people, plus a good time to relax!
 

 

3. Giving up on love

One of the best feelings in the world is to love someone and be loved back. Losing hope on love and all kinds of such emotion could make someone a robot – don’t be robots, people. Be happy turning gray with people you love and look back to life’s wonderful times. Enjoy the music; immerse with nature; hug someone; adopt a puppy; spread the love.
 

 

4. Wasting time

The common denominator among the humanity is time – we all have 24 hours a day. It’s up to you on how wise are you going to maximize it. You can give love to all the people in the world, but you can only spend time with people you chose to be with. A time well-spent is a quality time with your loved ones, good times with friends, and precious moments with your family.
 

 

5 Not taking risks

The younger you are, the more risks you take is a good-good situation for you. If you take risks and succeed, it will be a great experience; but if you take risks and fail, you learned the lesson. Don’t expect your life to change if you’re doing the same thing over and over again – take risks. Life will lead you the best of your potential if you go out of your comfort zone.

The best and worst times of your life will depend on the decisions you make. Take time to think everything through and make the most out of your life while you can.

How to Do it All (Almost) Perfectly: The Art of Satisficing

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How to Do it All (Almost) Perfectly: The Art of Satisficing

By Melody Wilding, 

You’re awesome at your job. You know it, feedback from colleagues and clients has affirmed it, and you consistently deliver results that are above and beyond what’s been asked of you. You repeat this pattern enough times and it becomes the norm—which, frankly, can be exhausting.

High achievers are prone to this pattern of behavior, which is usually completely unsustainable. Eventually, you realize that no matter how many cups of coffee you drink, after-work happy hours and gym sessions you cancel, or calls from your parents you send to voicemail, there’s no possible way to create what you really need: more hours in the day.

This leaves you in the tricky situation of having to take stock of everything on your plate and figure out how to make it all work—without going crazy. But if you’re used to doing it all (and doing it well), just the thought of prioritizing some of your to-dos over others probably makes you break into a sweat. How can you not do everything—and at 110%?

This is where you can employ a decision-making hack called “satisficing,” which combines “satisfying” with “sufficing.” It’s all about finding the solution that satisfies most criteria, rather than searching and searching for the optimal solution. Using this process to decide where to focus your time and energy will help you take care of everything that needs to be done, while still preserving your sanity.

Here’s how it works: Say you’ve taken on a huge new project at work that requires you to write a report on some research your team has done. You commit to writing 100 words each day, but find that you end up obsessing over quality of each day’s quota so much that you can barely get through the otherwise-reasonable daily goal you’ve set for yourself. This optimizing approach can quickly become problematic as you near your deadline.

However, if you use the satisficing approach instead, you’d simply crank out those 100 words each day, aiming for consistency, instead of perfection. Rather than scrutinizing each word you put on the page, you simply focus on getting them written. In the long run, having a long rough draft gets you closer to your end goal than not enough almost-perfect paragraphs.

Ready to give it a try? Here are some tips to make it work for you.

 

Accept That “Doing it All” is a False Ideal

The first step is to understand—and accept—that you are human and will never be able to achieve the impossible standard of “doing it all,” especially perfectly. Satisficing helps you recalibrate your expectations about what is realistic versus what’s a false ideal—which will help you better set yourself up for success.

 

Define the Critical “Must Dos”

Before you start on a project, take a moment to determine the base expectations or goals of the assignment, so you understand what exactly is required of you. For example, say you have a meeting to discuss the development of a brand new product and your team manages to fill up three whiteboards worth of notes. While everyone is excited about the new venture, it feels totally overwhelming. Using the satisficing approach, you could create a 30-day roadmap of the one or two initial key steps you’ll take to do your part getting the project off the ground, along with a task list of other tasks to accomplish in the next 60-90 days.

Parking-Lot New Ideas

As you come up with new ideas about how to improve or re-approach a project, be sure you have a repository to write them down, so that you can prioritize the critical must-do, and then return to your additional ideas afterward. Overachievers tend to try to juggle multiple things at once, so this system allows you to get your ideas out of your head and into a safe place that you can later return to. This “idea vault” not only serves as a home for brainstorming, but also allows you to objectively evaluate your ideas away from the chaos of your day-to-day to-do’s. You can then decide if they’re really worth your time, can remain on the back burner, or should be eliminated completely (because you’ve outgrown the idea or it simply no longer aligns with your goals).

 

Ship Often and Early

In the end, satisficing is all about execution. It emphasizes making smart decisions that allow you to create faster. So, as you execute, it’s important that you ship the results out into the world, rather than sit on them until you’re sure they’re perfect. Think of it as a beta test through which you gather valuable real-world feedback before moving on. For example, say you were asked to develop a new reporting format for your sales department. The satisficing approach would be to develop the format, then send it to your team for review and feedback before you spend weeks building a complex algorithm that no one ends up needing anyway.

 

Maybe you’re thinking that by using satisficing, you’re settling for “good enough,” which is just not how you operate—and in fact, you can’t imagine getting any “satisfaction” from the satisficing equation. But, I urge you to try it. Experts say that using satisficing to make decisions and complete projects can actually produce more happiness than optimizing or settling, because it minimizes the angst of doubt and over-analysis. It may feel uncomfortable at first to experiment with a new way of operating, but it’s one of the best ways to protect yourself from burnout and to ensure you’re continually taking action toward creating your own success.

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3 Phrases That Stress You Out the Second You Say Them

By Lea McLeod, M.A., 

The power of words is never more evident to me than when I’m working with a client or team and the language turns negative: The boss is difficult. The workloads are unmanageable. The policies are dumb.

Immediately, I see the negative effect that kind of language has on the situation. You see, when you say the boss is difficult or the work is stressful, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Organizational expert Robert Kreitner explains it like this: “We strive to validate our perceptions of reality, no matter how faulty they may be.”

So, if you think the boss is a nightmare, you’ll look for ways to validate that he is, in fact, a nightmare. You say you feel stressed; you’ll find more ways to feel stressed.

In the book Words Can Change Your Brain, authors Newberg and Waldman suggest, “A single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress.” That means, the more you engage in negative thinking and speech, the more your brain generates those kinds of thoughts. It’s a downward spiral that will not only affect your mood and outlook, but will create more stress for you as well. And who needs that? 

Let’s look at a couple of common refrains I hear far too often. Once you notice these phrases in your daily speech, you can take action to reframe them to take some stress out of your day. Imagine that—reducing stress just by changing up the way you talk.

1. “I’m Swamped”

This used to be a favorite of mine. Invite me to lunch? Can’t, I’m swamped. Take Friday off? No way, I’m swamped.

But now, I stay away from this one. If I keep saying I’m swamped, then I feel, well, swamped. I’m simply reinforcing the feeling of being overwhelmed, whether I truly am or not.

Instead, stay realistic about your workload—even if it’s a bit overwhelming. Try phrases like, “I’ve got a lot to do right now, but I know I’ll complete it all on time,” “This is a huge project, but if I break it into smaller pieces it’ll be less overwhelming,” or, “There’s a lot on my plate, and I need time away to recharge. Taking Friday off will be good for me.”

 

2. “I’m So Busy”

I know very few people who feel that they aren’t super busy right now. It’s almost become a badge of honor to proclaim to our colleagues how consumed we are by our important activities.

Surprisingly, it could be your behavior, more than your workload, that’s giving you “busy syndrome.” Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, says our obsession with multitasking is one of the culprits. 

When we multitask, we don’t actually do things simultaneously; we switch back and forth between tasks. So, working on an email, while on a phone call, then responding to instant messages that pop up makes you feel far busier than you would be if you managed only one task at a time and gave it your full attention.

When you’re inclined to say, “I’m so busy,” stop and assess what you’re really doing. Are you busy trying to do three things at one time and projecting that on your entire job (or life)? Instead, eliminate the phrase entirely. Start saying to yourself, “I’m not that busy, I’m focused on the one thing I’m doing now”—and then do it.

 

3. “I Don’t Have Time for That”

The trap of blaming a lack of time for not being able to do something is a common one. In the week ahead, notice how many times you find yourself saying, “I don’t have time to deal with [insert dreaded task here].”

Whether your inbox is overflowing or your home office is completely disheveled because you “don’t have time” to organize, stop and think about it. Is it really because you don’t have time?

The reality is we all have the same number of hours in a day. So when you say, “I don’t have time,” you’re really saying that you’ve chosen not to give that activity your time and attention.

Over the next few weeks, change it up. Instead of saying you don’t have time, say, “That’s not a priority for me right now.” Or, “I know that needs to get done, but right now these other three things are more important.” Clearly delineating your priorities puts you in control of your time and to-do list, instead of the other way around.

 

The fact is, the way you talk about yourself and your workplace has a huge influence on your stress level—and ultimately, your satisfaction. Watch for these three sayings this week, and see how you can change it up, reduce your stress, and relieve some of the pressure.

Today's Life Tips

One Easy Tip to Peeling Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs

http://sci2.tv

 

A Short Guide to a Happy Life: Anna Quindlen on Work, Joy, and How to Live Rather Than Exist

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A Short Guide to a Happy Life: Anna Quindlen on Work, Joy, and How to Live Rather Than Exist

by Maria Popova

“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

 

The commencement address is a special kind of modern communication art, and its greatest masterpieces tend to either become a book — take, for instance, David Foster Wallace on the meaning of life, Neil Gaiman on the resilience of the creative spirit, Ann Patchett on storytelling and belonging, and Joseph Brodsky on winning the game of life — or have originated from a book, such as Debbie Millman on courage and the creative life. One of the greatest commencement speeches of all time, however, has an unusual story that flies in the face of both traditional trajectories.

In 2000, Villanova University invited Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, journalist, and New York Times op-ed columnist Anna Quindlen to deliver the annual commencement address. But once the announcement was made, a group of conservative students staged a protest against Quindlen’s strong liberal views. The commencement was cancelled. “I don’t think you should have to walk through demonstrators to get to your college commencement,” Quindlen lamented. Rather than retreat, however, she emailed the undelivered commencement address to a Villanova graduate student who had expressed disappointment at the situation. Years before the social web as we know it today, the speech spread like wildfire across the internet. A few months later, Quindlen expanded it into the short and lovely book A Short Guide to a Happy Life (public 

library).

 

                                                        Anna Quindlen (artwork based on a photograph by Grant M. Haller)

Quindlen begins:

I’ve never earned a doctorate, or even a master’s degree. I’m not an ethicist, or a philosopher, or an expert in any particular field… I can’t talk about the economy, or the universe, or academe, as academicians like to call where they work when they’re feeling kind of grand. I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is really all I know.

And know it she does:

Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first. Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
Don’t ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”

Quindlen considers the question of the self and what makes us who we are, what makes us worthy of being. And while the great Annie Dillard may have cautioned to not “ever use the word ‘soul,’ if possible,” it seems impossible to address the question of what makes a meaningful life without addressing the human soul, which Quindlen does beautifully:

There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn’t look so good, or when the doctor writes “prognosis, poor.”

                   

  Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'Open House for Butterflies' by Ruth Krauss. Click image for more.

Even those trying to find their purpose, even those engaged in fulfilling work, and even those of us lucky enough to have no separation between “life” and “work,” can get consumed by our modern cult of productivity. Quindlen’s words come as a vital reminder of what matters, what counts, what the true aliveness of life is:

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you developed an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast while in the shower?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.

Here, Annie Dillard, who so memorably expounded the power of presence over productivity in the making of a rich life, would have agreed. For Quindlen, however, an even richer life than that of simply being present is one of being present with a palpable generosity of spirit towards the world:

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beers in a bar and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Tutor a seventh-grader.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

   Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I'll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss. Click image for more.

Quindlen, who had a jarring confrontation with the mortality paradox early in life — at nineteen, she lost her mother to ovarian cancer and spent her sophomore year of college administering morphine while her peers partied — considers the Alan Wattsian idea that putting at rest our resistance to the inevitability of death liberates us to be more alive. (Sarah Lewis put this beautifully when she observed, “When we surrender to the fact of death, not the idea of it, we gain license to live more fully, to see life differently.”) Quindlen reflects on the tragedy that split her life into a “before” and an “after”:

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.
[…]

“Before” and “after” for me was not just before my mother’s illness and after her death. It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on, for the darkest possible reason.

And I went back to school and I looked around at all the kids I knew who found it kind of a drag and who weren’t sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.

                                             Watercolor by Alessandro Sanna from 'The River.' Click image for more.

“We have entered a new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning,” philosopher Roman Krznaric wrote in his fantastic manifesto for finding meaningful work, but Quindlen reminds us that the luxury of seeking fulfillment rather than mere survival came at a price — and yet how easily we take it for granted:

It’s ironic that we forget so often how wonderful life really is. We have more time than ever before to remember it. The men and women of generations past had to work long, long hours to support lots and lots of children in tiny, tiny houses. The women worked in factories and sweatshops and then at home, too, with two bosses, the one who paid them, and the one they were married to, who didn’t. . . . Our jobs take too much out of us and don’t pay enough.

She continues:

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.
[…]

This is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.

          

                                               Photograph by Myron Davis for 'The Meaning of Life.' Click image for more.

How, then, are we to fully inhabit the miracle of our existence, that cosmic accident by the grace of which we ended up alive, here, now? Quindlen offers a gateway to presence:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

A Short Guide to a Happy Life is the kind of read that stays with you for a long time, the sort you revisit again and again when the ground beneath your feet shakes and you reach for a reminder of the solid center. Complement it with more fantastic commencement addresses by Bill Watterson, Joss Whedon, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Jacqueline Novogratz, Aaron Sorkin, Barack Obama, Ray Bradbury, J. K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, Robert Krulwich, Meryl Streep, and Jeff Bezos

How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

Today's Life Tips

How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

by Maria Popova

http://www.brainpickings.org

Why prestige is the enemy of passion, or how to master the balance of setting boundaries and making friends.

“

Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, “and dedicate your life to it.” But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. I myself am a firm believer in the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery. Still, there are certain factors — certain choices — that make it easier. Gathered here are insights from seven thinkers who have contemplated the art-science of making your life’s calling a living. 

 

PAUL GRAHAM ON HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE

Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What You Love. It’s brilliant in its entirety, but the part I find of especial importance and urgency is his meditation on social validation and the false merit metric of “prestige”:

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.

[…]

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

[…]

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.”

More of Graham’s wisdom on how to find meaning and make wealth can be found in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

ALAIN DE BOTTON ON SUCCESS

 Alain de Botton, modern philosopher and creator of the “literary self-help genre”, is a keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our cultural conceits.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he takes his singular lens of wit and wisdom to the modern workplace and the ideological fallacies of “success.”

His terrific 2009 TED talk offers a taste:

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

HUGH MACLEOD ON SETTING BOUNDARIES

 

Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod is as well-known for his irreverent doodles as he is for his opinionated musings on creativity, culture, and the meaning of life. In Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, he gathers his most astute advice on the creative life. Particularly resonant with my own beliefs about the importance of choices is this insight about setting boundaries:

16. The most important thing a creative per­son can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.”

Later, MacLeod echoes Graham’s point about prestige above:

28. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.”

LEWIS HYDE ON WORK VS. LABOR

 




After last year’s omnibus of 5 timeless books on fear and the creative process, a number of readers rightfully suggested an addition: Lewis Hyde’s 1979 classic, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, of which David Foster Wallace famously said, “No one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged.”

In this excerpt, originally featured here in January, Hyde articulates the essential difference between work and creative labor, understanding which takes us a little closer to the holy grail of vocational fulfillment:

Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.
…
There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a term for the quality that sets labor apart from work: flow — a kind of intense focus and crisp sense of clarity where you forget yourself, lose track of time, and feel like you’re part of something larger. If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter for a pet project, or even spent 20 consecutive hours composing a love letter, you’ve experienced flow and you know creative labor.

STEVE JOBS ON NOT SETTLING

In his now-legendary 2005 Stanford commencement address, an absolute treasure in its entirety, Steve Jobs makes an eloquent case for not settling in the quest for finding your calling — a case that rests largely on his insistence upon the power of intuition:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

ROBERT KRULWICH ON FRIENDS

Robert Krulwich, co-producer of WNYC’s fantastic Radiolab, author of the ever-illuminating Krulwich Wonders and winner of a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence, is one of the finest journalists working today. In another great commencement address, he articulates the infinitely important social aspect of loving what you do — a kind of social connectedness far more meaningful and genuine than those notions of prestige and peer validation.

You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you, and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.
…
If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re saying it — is something new in the world.”

THE HOLSTEE MANIFESTO

You might recall The Holstee Manifesto as one of our 5 favorite manifestos for the creative life, an eloquent and beautifully written love letter to the life of purpose. (So beloved is the manifesto around here that it has earned itself a permanent spot in the Brain Pickings sidebar, a daily reminder to both myself and you, dear reader, of what matters most.)

This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. If you don’t like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.”

The Holstee Manifesto is now available as a beautiful letterpress print, a 5×7 greeting card printed on handmade paper derived from 50% elephant poo and 50% recycled paper, and even a baby bib — because it’s never too early to instill the values of living from passion.