As this blog’s readership grows, popular articles posted in the first half of the year get left behind in my end-of-year list (2016, 2015) of popular posts. Here are the top 10 popular posts from the first half of this year based on email- and feed-subscribership:
- Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments of Honest Thought and Discourse. The celebrated British mathematician, logician, and political activist wrote, “The essence of the liberal outlook is a belief that men should be free to question anything if they can support their questioning by solid arguments.”
- Book Summary of “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!” Journalist Nicholas Carlson chronicles the fabled legacy internet company’s slide to irrelevance. Despite her extraordinary credentials, drive, technical savvy, celebrity, and charisma, Marissa Mayer arrived too late to right the ship.
- Six Powerful Reasons to Eat Slowly and Mindfully. Cultivate a healthy relationship with food. Dedicating time to eat slowly, mindfully, and intentionally—and enjoying the pleasure of food—can make an enormous difference in your diet and health.
- Learn from the Great Minds of the Past. If you wish to succeed in your life, there is no better source of inspiration than in the lives of those who have changed our lives and our world for the better. Biographies stimulate self-discovery.
- Be a Survivor, Not a Victim: Lessons on Adversity from Charlie Munger. Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice-Chairman overcame “horrible blows, unfair blows” on the road to success. Munger counsels, “Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.” Don’t operate life on the assumption that the world ought to be fair, just, and objective. You are neither entitled nor unentitled to good treatment.
- The Only Goal You Need for 2017: Doing Is Everything. Most folks know what they should do: lose weight, start exercising, stop smoking, get serious about managing careers, find a romantic partner, start saving money, and so on. Yet they can’t seem to make themselves do. One of the most insidious obstacles to your success in life is the chasm between knowing and doing.
- Competition Can Push You to Achieve Greater Results. Tennis legend Andre Agassi wrote in his interesting autobiography, “There were times my rivals brought out the best in me; there were times they brought out the worst. They probably helped me win things I never would have otherwise; they also cost me titles.” A certain amount of competition can be helpful when it motivates you and doesn’t result in stress or hurt your personal relationships.
- Addiction to Pleasure is a Symptom of Fear. Whenever you seek pleasure, not only do you become dependent on the eagerness to find it, but also you create an existence of suffering, because pleasure is impermanent and fleeting. Buddhism encourages you to purge yourself of your attachment to pleasure or to any source of satisfaction that could trigger distress in seeking to make it permanent.
- The Cost of Leadership Incivility. Steve Jobs’s advice to PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi to “throw tantrums” at employees and “certain words a little bit more freely” to express passion is abhorrently misguided. Steve Jobs could throw temper tantrums because he could! However, a leader’s tone is the foundation upon which the culture of her organization is built.
- How to Deal with Upset Customers. Nine guidelines that can result in a constructive interaction with an angry customer and restore his perception of satisfaction and loyalty. A failure to recognize and quickly respond to the needs of angry customers can make them feel ignored, frustrated, and powerless.
And here are articles from 2016 that continue to be popular:
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