Author: Matthew Voss
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How Stop Being a Perfectionist and Reduce Work Stress
Being a perfectionist early in your career is exhausting. You’re scared you’ll get fired if you mess up, you have too much to do in too little time, and it feels like nothing is ever good enough. It sounds trite, but here’s the solution that’s helped me the most: “Show off your shit.” When Perfectionism…
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How Much Has Anger Stolen From You?
I used to work with a toxic Vice President. He verbally assaults people in front of others, manipulates, takes advantage of those who are afraid of him, and fires the rest. His nickname is “Tall Scary Bald Man”. I rehearse arguments with him in the shower daily, I fume and fantasize about telling him off…
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Why You Shouldn’t Hide Bad News or Lie to Avoid Conflict
Do you think hiding bad news from other people is helping them? There’s a tornado on the way and you think hiding that fact is a nice thing to do? What gives you the fucking right? They have one life to live. They can’t get today back and because of you they spent it walking…
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83 Questions To Troubleshoot Your Life
These prompts might uncover some painful baggage you haven’t looked at in a while. If something really resonates, write a comment about it. Myself or other readers might have advice/books/podcasts that helped us with a similar problem. All of these are issues I’ve struggled with so I guarantee you are not alone. Your Needs When…
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Stop Expecting Life to Get Easy
It seems like you think something is missing. It’s like you’re impatient for the struggles and uncertainty and pain of life to be over. You just want to get the missing ingredient so your life can be easy/simple/better. It’s never going to happen. It doesn’t matter how much you read, who is in your life,…
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Most of What You Tell Yourself is Wrong – Zooming Out Can Help
Let’s step out of your perspective for a moment. Put down every fear, every insecurity, every ambition of what you might have become, regret of unmet expectation, every worry of how others feel about you, and every good or bad judgment you’ve ever placed on yourself. Throw them away. Now zoom out until the whole…
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The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get
Want to have more luck in life? Don’t get mad but I’m starting to think every time I work really hard, good luck follows. Luck is hard work in disguise I feel incredibly lucky to have great friends. They are wonderful people, we lean on each other and make great memories together. But is “luck”…
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You Don’t Need Motivation. You Just Need Your Stagnation to be Visible
It sounds like you have a lot on your plate, and that kind of accumulation of responsibilities can be super stressful and hard to face. I’ve been there, a lot of people have. I think being really blunt with yourself might be the best path forward. Each day you have things you need to do…
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Have a Quote that Helps You in Dark Moments? Putting Mine on a Bracelet Changed Everything
So there I was, half way through a tub of cookie dough, empty Panda Express delivery box beside me, and an inbox full of work emails I’d been ignoring all day. This was a pretty ugly relapse. I’m still not 100% sure what triggered it, but I definitely got caught up in the escapism and…
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How Often is Your Anxiety Right About Things?
A funny thought occurred to me the other day. I had been having a lot of anxiety over the week and was just terrified of so many things that I thought might go wrong. As usual, none of them did. The next time my inner Chicken Little started tweeting my immediate reaction was this: “Dude…
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The Mountain and the Mayfly
A strange thought struck me as I was driving through the mountains: what advice would they give me? These ancient giants of earth and stone have watched civilizations rise and fall, species go extinct, and ice ages come and pass. Could my mind even comprehend such advice? A mountain’s age compared to mine would be…
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What Are You Unwilling to Admit to Yourself?
That title is a journal prompt that can bring up some painful but important truths. Not surface level “I still haven’t hit my weight loss goal” or “my bucket list looks the same as it did 5 years ago” stuff. I’m talking about things like: ”Most jobs would be as good or better than the…
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You Can’t Escape Your Problems by Solving Someone Else’s
You seem really uneasy whenever you don’t have something to do. It’s like if you’re not working, or helping others, or engaged in some other distraction that you really fall apart. Why is that? Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. I do it too sometimes, because it’s hard for me to be by myself. If I’m…
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How to Set Boundaries: Teach People How They Can Treat You
Each friendship or relationship is like two people steering a ship, but each can only see out the window on their side of the ship. They are trying to avoid an iceberg on their side and steer hard towards your side, but you have an iceberg on your side too. The ship can safely sail…
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How to Get Started in Self Improvement
I see a lot of people here not knowing where to start with self improvement. Everyone has to find their own formula and ditch all the advice that doesn’t work for them, but there are some guidelines that can make that journey easier. Let’s talk about it. Use a spreadsheet to track habits I like…
Millennial Anxiety 