In June of this year I crossed off a major item on my bucket list by playing in the 2016 World Series of Poker held at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas. It was the culmination of a journey that started 10 years ago, when a teammate from my university soccer team coaxed me into signing-up on an online poker site so that he could redeem a $25 referral bonus — something he had exploited so well that it...
My roommate was laying on his bed, staring blankly at the bare ceiling. We were sharing a tiny concrete cell roughly 7 square feet in size, and we hadn’t spoken to each other in 8 days. Normally if you haven’t spoken to your roommate in 8 days it’s because you’re fighting. But we weren’t fighting. We were meditating. When I arrived in Myanmar the only thing I knew about Vipassana Meditation was...
I grew up with the most inspiring brother you could imagine. When I was a kid he used to put motivational messages up around my room. I remember waking up and seeing his handwriting on the ceiling above my bed: “Did you get better today?” I was 11 years old. I’d turn on my computer to see that he’d changed my desktop background: “Someone somewhere is working harder than you.” Who has a brother...
Consider two statistics. Statistic #1: The average person spends 90,000 hours of their life at work. Statistic #2: 80% of working professionals are dissatisfied with their job (according to Deloitte’s Shift Index survey). Put another way, our plight looks something like this: (A lot of time doing something) x (Not enjoying doing that something) = L L is our life. It seems we can do two things to...
