I recently met someone who kindly offered to share my resume with her many contacts in the writing world. But, no sooner had I sent her my resume than she sent it right back. Please describe your experience on Medium, she said, Not all relevant experience is for money.

Call me naive (and perhaps a little dense) but I hadn’t even considered putting the work I’ve done on Medium on my resume. It didn’t strike me as something that belonged there. It felt too personal.

It only took a moment’s thought, however, to bring me around to her way of…

Until very recently, I had no interest in the class of drugs known as psychedelics. In my mind, the people who used these drugs were clueless, aimless, and lost. Just the thought of taking one of these drugs made me fearful of becoming one of those people.

I stopped feeling this way after reading How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. In this fantastic book, Pollan describes the scientific and political history of these drugs and what recent studies have taught us about how they affect the brain. What especially caught my attention were the personal stories of experiences…

When we want to make a difference, we often come up with grand schemes, don’t we? We think about how to end poverty. We wonder about how to slow or stop climate change. We ponder about how to close the growing gap between our political parties. We contemplate how to create community and fellowship in our cities and nations.

The thing is, these problems are enormous. They tend to involve so many moving parts that our actions can seem pointless. While we all have opinions about these things, how can we, individually, make much of a difference? …

In his early 20s, JRR Tolkien, along with his three best friends, was thrust into the trenches of the first World War. Two of those friends would not survive.

In part because of this terrible and terrifying lived experience, Tolkien would weave together a narrative that will undoubtedly stand as one of humanity’s greatest literary works. What I love about Tolkien is that, despite the horrors he endured, he had a beautiful optimism toward life. He even coined a term when he realized there was no opposite of the word catastrophe. He called it a eucatastrophe. …

Recently, I’ve been struggling. I love to learn new things and then write about them, but for whatever reason, that’s been hard lately. I’ve been frequently distracted by the things I know are not as important (cough*Netflix*cough) and they’ve been pulling me away from what I love to do.

It’s incredible, isn’t it, that we can act so obviously against our best interest? In some cases, we know exactly what would make us happy, yet a part of us fights against that with all its might. And it often wins, doesn’t it?! Confronted with that overwhelming force, we roll over…

Surrender is not about giving up, but about letting go of counterfeit control. – Brene Brown

When you hear the word “surrender”, do you roll your eyes?

I mean, it sounds like giving up, giving in, raising a white flag, and rolling over. These things stand in sharp contrast to our ingrained sense of taking responsibility and ownership over our lives. How could surrender, taken this way, possibly be any good for us?

It might also remind you of religion. Many of the world’s religions ask that their followers submit to the will of a higher power.

What I’d like…

In the 1990s, parents were told to stop giving their young children peanut butter. The purpose of this recommendation was to reduce peanut allergies later in life. Unfortunately, this advice was not backed by any firm science.

But, experts also didn’t know whether introducing certain foods early in life was a good idea. Enter Gideon Lack, Professor of Paediatric Allergy at King’s College London. He set out to test the outcomes of early exposure to peanuts.

In 2010, Lack recruited 640 children who were already exhibiting allergies to eggs and split them into two groups. He asked parents of the…

This article is based on Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Highly recommended!

Have you ever wondered why it’s so difficult to talk to people on the other side of the political spectrum? We call them words like “crazy”, “stupid”, “racist”, and “naive”. But, could it really be that simple? Or, could something else be going on that makes understanding each other difficult at the best of times, and impossible at the worst?

Moral Foundations Theory, examined by Jonathan Haidt in his excellent book, The Righteous Mind, suggests that there are at…