“Urgent Optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope for success.” Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and game designer specializing in alternate reality games that are “designed to improve real lives and solve real problems”. Her TED talks on “how games can make a better world” and “the game that can add 10 years to your life” have accumulated over 15 million views, placing them among the most popular TED talks ever. “Future forecaster”. Now that is a cool title. What in the world is a future forecaster you ask? And What does it have to do with optimism or leadership? Let’s find out. What in The World Is Urgent Optimism? As Director of Games, Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, McGonigal runs

Why is it so difficult to achieve challenging objectives? We intellectually know how to lose weight. We understand that exercise is good for us. Deep down, we have a good sense of the required first steps toward our personal projects.  Why is it so hard to take what are seemingly simple first steps towards our objectives? When we fall short of our goals there are two things that quickly come to mind: I must lack willpower or I just don’t have enough energy to get things done. Is Your Body Tired Or Is Your Brain Fried? The odds are stacked against us in this battle against mental fatigue. There are two main culprits that chip away at our vivacity. Mental Fatigue And Perceived Effort Research has shown that mental fatigue has real, measurable effects on the body. As the day goes

I woke at 5:30 with a sore body and a satisfied spirit. A sensory cocktail that I’ve grown to love. As I shuffle out of the guest bedroom and down the steep stairs of my 50’s wartime home, I’m reminded that I am not as young as I once was. I’m not quite old yet, but having spent my 20’s working in an office, hard physical work makes my soft “young professional” body feel every single one of its 30 years. I’m glad that I gave my parents the main bedroom though, the futon sucks.   I’m the first one out of bed but I hear the rustling upstairs already as I get the coffee going. My parents packing their bags to head back home. Dad made fun of my “complicated” coffee all weekend but I can tell he likes

Positive affirmations are often promoted in the self-help community as a tool that can stop negative self-talk in its track and boost your self-esteem. The problem with negative self-talk is that if you repeat anything long enough you begin to believe it. So if we’re able to believe the bad things we repeat to ourselves, can we Jedi mind trick ourselves into believing positive things instead? With that in mind, I began to wonder, If I force myself into a daily practice of repeating positive catchphrases out loud over and over again before work, will it change my mindset and improve my performance? Is it really that simple? Well, yes and no. Do Positive Affirmations Work? The research on the effectiveness of positive affirmations shows that telling ourselves that we’re awesome over and over again or ignoring the issues in

By learning to consistently do things well, regardless of how much we enjoy the specific thing we’re working on, we set ourselves up for success. Consistently doing things well doesn’t mean being successful at everything you do. It means that you’ll execute the task at hand to the best of your abilities. Even when no one is looking. Even when there’s no external reward. Establishing and maintaining your own personal gold standard of execution defines your character. Regardless of the task at hand, your gold standard of execution is the baseline level at which you operate. It may sound simple, but this ability to disconnect the quality of effort delivered to a task from how interesting or fulfilling it takes discipline. It’s a rewarding daily practice that requires constant effort. Define Your Gold Standard A good example of this mindset

The three pillars of well-being are the three elements of your life that act as a foundation to help keep you sane. A simple way to think about what defines your own foundation is to ask yourself: does this give me energy, or does it drain my energy? The pillars of your life are the things that give you energy. They put gas in the tank and wind in the sails. Balance is a tricky concept, but if you are looking to live a balanced life, these are the things that you need to do on a regular basis to keep the scales in check. They lay down the brickwork that we can build a solid life upon. Foundation activities will be different for everybody. It requires a good deal of trial and error to find your own, but I

Dreaming big and visualization are indispensable tools that help to reach any ambitious goal. Without visionary dreamers, the human race wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are now. We would never have made it to the moon, computers wouldn’t be a thing and there would be no art of any kind. Transporting ourselves into the future to imagine what it’s like to succeed and working backwards from there sheds some light on the obstacles that plague the path to success and the skills required to overcome them. Putting ourselves in the shoes of our idols can also illuminate the path from zero to hero. If they can do it, why not me? Is there a point where visualization and dreaming big stops being a tool and becomes a nuisance? What if visualization turns into a fantasy world of comparison

“…the tracker’s instinct is always to go into the unknown. We live with an intense curiosity. It is the means by which life pulls us to a destiny bigger than what we could have imagined for ourselves” Boyd Varty has lived a remarkable life, though I wouldn’t expect anything less from someone who has “Lion Tracker” as a job title. In his book, The Lion Trackers Guide To Life, Boyd recounts a day-long excursion in the South African bush where he tracks a Lion with his mentors Renias and Alex. He lures you into the journey with masterful storytelling and sneaks in timeless wisdom from a life spent in apprenticeship to the natural world along the way. When he`s not tracking lions or surviving crocodile attacks, Boyd is a tracker of purpose. He has been working for years as a

Something that I hear all the time from people who have achieved great things in life, be it in sports, art or business, is that everything started happening for them after they decided to go all in. This always did more to make me feel down and powerless than it did to fire me up. I would think “It must be nice to have the time to go all in on something”. I felt like I missed the boat. Going all in on a passion project looked to me like something you can only do in your early 20s, when you don’t have a mortgage or haven’t committed to a career and you have limited responsibilities. I didn’t have that kind of focus in my early 20s so it must be too late for me. I am great at generating

Television is the default distraction device in the Baldwin household. Our watching habits have changed over the years but it’s still the go-to activity when we need a break from the daily grind. This is why we decided to embark on this 30 day challenge. We mostly consume TV series from different streaming platforms. We don’t have cable or satellite, or whatever non-streaming network providers are available these days. We also don’t watch the news and we don’t surf the channels looking for something that’s worth our attention. The way that we consume television has changed immensely since I was a kid. I remember when we would have to memorize the time slots when our favorite shows would play so that we could tune in at the right time to catch the weekly episode. Running to the kitchen to get