Keeping ideas connected to reality so they can serve our lives in reality.
Maximizing Your Creativity with Productive Meditation
Deep Work: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” —Cal Newport What if you could produce...
Cracking the Code on Team Performance
Daniel Coyle, in The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, presents a compelling case for why some teams are more successful than others. His one-word answer is “culture,” which he defines as “the way that people interact within an organized...
Art as Inspiration: Lang Lang at the Prado
Great musicians can inspire students of music to improve their own playing and artistry. I experienced this myself in 2017 when, as a novice piano student, I went to see the world-renowned pianist Lang Lang on tour. I was awestruck by his technical skill, fluidity,...
Cara E. Yar Khan on the Value of Courage
“Courage and confidence are practical necessities . . . courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.” —Ayn Rand I love listening to people...
How TOS-Con Changed My Life
November 5, 2019: That was the day that changed everything for me. For the past three months, I had been working through my first semester of a graduate program to get a master’s in philosophy. I planned to teach philosophy at the university level. I was performing...
Five Steps for Building Lasting Habits/Routines
Author’s Note: Over the years, I have learned a lot from the work of Cal Newport, Mel Robbins, Alex Epstein, and Jean Moroney on the topic of building positive habits. The following includes my own integration of some of their ideas. Building life-promoting habits...
Orlando’s Christmas Gift: Two Nutcrackers and Spiritual Fuel
When was the last time you leaped to your feet to applaud artists performing live in a theater? It seems like forever ago for me. That void was recently filled to the brim in downtown Orlando, Florida, when I attended two performances by local ballet companies of...
How to Make Work Something You Love
For many people, “work” is a word with unpleasant associations. Children associate it with the burden of school work, which they have to do, like it or not. Many adults associate it with a nine-to-five job, an onerous chore that they believe they must endure in...
Discovering the Good: Morality, and Where It Comes From
On December 14 at 2:00 pm ET, the Ayn Rand Centre UK will host a discussion with Craig Biddle and Douglas Murray, moderated by Gloria Alvarez, on the nature and source of morality. Here’s an indication of what’s in store: A sign of a society in disarray is the...