Alex Lickerman is a physician and practices Nichiren Buddhism, and he writes a weekly blog titled Happiness in this World. Each post is calm, sane, sensible, well-reasoned, and usually includes those boldface steps on things to do or remember that us blog-readers love to bookmark yet never follow up on. His post on How to …
Category Archives: Advice
My nephew’s philosophy
My brother’s oldest son, Stuart, was asked by his teacher what he liked about school. He answered, “It’s not about what I like, it’s what I have to get used to.”
The bones beneath the skin
A few months ago, I was struck by this tweet from HiroBoga. For whatever reason, a circuit snapped in my head and I Got It. All my little productivity obsessions and systems were all about creating my own infrastructure: my calendar, my to-do list, my inbox, my habits, all of it. If I were to …
Lavers on The Simple Life
My previous post Fred Stutzman and Facebook reminded me of an essay from the May/August 2000 issue of North American Review. The essay I tore out and kept in my “Essays” folder lo these many years was by the writer Norman Lavers, now retired from teaching English and enthusiastically maintaining a site on The Robber …
Is grad school a good idea?
Penelope Trunk trots out one of her regularly visited themes: why grad school is a bad idea. It rankled me a bit but I do have to remember that she’s talking to twenty-somethings and I’m a forty-odder. Her advice would be right-on to my 23-year-old self: I had very little direction, a graduate degree would …
Links Harvest
Economic downturn hitting public libraries. Also, library fines. Another popularly focused article on the digital dark age; it proposes using open-source rather than proprietary file formats. The best suit for your body type. Proto-scholar learns the hard way to ask the right people for process advice. No one would blame her for feeling angry and …
No Heroic Efforts
I meant to add this time management rule to my previous Fall Review post. I can’t remember whether it originated with Mark Forster or David Allen, but it goes something like this: At all costs, avoid heroic efforts to get things done. Examples of an heroic effort would be pulling an all-nighter or shoving all …
Fall Review
Image via Wikipedia During 2007’s fall break, I took a breather and penned (odd word for a blog post, but I’ll use it) an update on how the semester was going and the changes I was going through at that time. A question from Brother Thomas and my friend Rani’s firing up of her own …
Nirvana, or something like it
My friend Rani left me the following intriguing comment: Mike – would love to know how the life/school/work balance (or juggle rather) is going. Have you been able to obtain equilibrium at all? What about nirvana? I was going to reply as a blog post that night but spent too much time working on an …
The Trials of Joblessness
One in a periodic series of re-postings from the my first blog, Oddments of High Unimportance. Oddments of High Unimportance: The Trials of Joblessnes [W]hat I would do differently the next time I find myself without a job, and, just as important, what I should do now to ensure my next jobless stint doesn’t last …
Brownstudy's Blog 