How to Overcome FOMO

You may know FOMO, or fear of missing out. It’s that feeling you get when a friend suggests that you take a trapeze class. It sounds horrible to you and you dread going, but you don’t want everyone else to do it without you and the fear of missing out wins over your fear of falling off the trapeze.

fomo fear (read more…)

Does Your Greatest Strength Reveal Your Biggest Weakness?

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It’s a typical Sunday when my boyfriend is happy to relax and laze about in the hammock in my back patio — and I join him for about 15 minutes before I get restless and ask what we’re going to do next. This ability to easily relax and enjoy leisure is what I call his “vacation brain.” Very little upsets him; he is generally calm and almost never defensive. There is a flipside to this enviable quality, though. His relaxed demeanor means a certain detachment. He prefers to avoid difficult things and easily puts them out of mind (sometimes to my annoyance).

These opposing traits are two sides of the same coin, or, what I think of as a Janus face.  Janus is the Roman god of motion and transitions. Since these concepts are complementary in nature – starting one thing means ending another, arriving in one place requires leaving somewhere else — Janus is usually depicted as having two faces, one looking to the future, and one to the past. Similarly, our greatest strengths are typically the inverse of our biggest weaknesses. (read more…)

Behind the Scenes at Small Answers

Behind the scenes

Writing is one of those funny things, like breathing, that everyone can do in the most literal way. We all wrote in school– stories, essays, reports. We are all able to string words into sentences and commit them to a page. Yet, as adults, few people claim to be a writer. We get hung up on the meaning of the word, and we fear not measuring up to our expectations around what a writer is. We get stuck.

Because the stories we share on Small Answers are born in self-reflection, when we feel stuck, it’s generally because our thinking hasn’t crystallized. We haven’t done the hard work of figuring out what we are really trying to say. (read more…)

A Visit to the Doctor of Chinese Medicine

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It starts not with blood pressure, temperature, and weight measurements, but with looking at the top and bottom of your tongue and feeling your pulse on both wrists.

Visiting a doctor who practices traditional Chinese medicine is nothing like visiting a Western doctor. The language, diagnostics, and classification of illness are completely different. When I recently asked my Chinese medicine doctor how I was doing, her assessment was that my blood was deficient and that my heart had too much fire. My qi wasn’t cycling enough times during the day to resolve these issues on their own* (*my interpretation of what she said). (read more…)

This is How It Happens, Or What I Learned from Steve Jobs

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When Steve Jobs was seventeen, he dropped out of Reed College after just six months. The tuition was too expensive and he wasn’t sure where it was leading. But he stuck around the campus, sleeping on floors in friends’ dorms and started dropping in on classes that looked interesting. At that time, Reed had amazing calligraphy instruction. Jobs, struck by the beautiful, calligraphed campus posters, decided to take a class. Jobs had no practical application in mind at the time, but as he described it in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, he was fascinated learning about “serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.”

It was a full ten years later before any of this knowledge came to practical use. (read more…)