Self-Improvement - Page 3
A collection of posts on Self Improvement
I was catching up with our team’s messages on Discourse recently when I came across a unique message thread. It wasn’t about trial numbers, FAQs or monthly recurring revenue . It was about empathy. Empathy feels so crucial to the Buffer culture, and yet the word doesn’t appear anywhere in our values right now. Maybe
At this exact moment, I have 16 tabs open in my browser. How about you? With the full power of the internet at our disposal, it can be pretty easy to waste precious moments navigating to the…let’s say, less-than-productive corners of the web. I’m as guilty of this as anyone—I’ve even shared extensively how often I get sucked into Facebook! So it’s great that there are quite a few folks out there focused on helping us keep track of what really matters as we surf the web. There’s a particularl
I’ll be the first to admit it: When I first got hooked on the idea of startups, the goal in my mind was monetary. I wanted to be “financially free” so that I could do all the things I wanted to do but was unable to do due to money. So my first startup was a “big idea.” It could change the world (or at least I thought so), and I would be rewarded enormously for what I would do — given time. After trying a few different ways in order to reach the success I had in mind, I realized that I was unh
I was talking with Leo the other day about plans to launch a new Buffer feature when he said something that totally rearranged my mind. He diplomatically opened the conversation with an “If we can…” type statement and I immediately keyed in on the uncertainty I heard in that “if”, asking about alternative dates and plans, the likelihood of this or that. Leo quickly corrected what I had heard: “It’s going to happen. There is no backup plan.” And immediately, my brain calmed. Shifted. Crystalli
In the world of weight training, it’s well known that having a partner can lead to seeing gains more quickly. And research has shown that those who switch from training alone to using a personal trainer see many improvements. Similarly, pair programming has been shown to improve quality of code, as well as keep both developers in “flow” state for a more sustained period of time. The people around you can have a significant impact on your behavior. If I tell a friend about my goals, I’m much mo
Making time to go offline is never easy. There’s almost never a “right time” to do it; you might lose opportunities or even business while disconnecting. And yet, if you don’t actively look for ways to disconnect, it’s not very likely to happen by itself. We have all accepted that eating well and exercising are important to be in great physical shape. We’re now also starting to take better care of our minds by managing our attention. Our own attention is a scarce commodity. Where we focus our
Try to think back to a time when you felt incredibly confident. You instinctively knew you could handle whatever came at you. You were on top of things, making all the right moves. You were in the zone. It’s an amazing feeling, and one that we’d probably all like to have more often. The book The Confidence Code gets right to the point of why this element is so crucial in our lives: “Scholars are coming to see (confidence) as an essential element of internal well-being and happiness, a necess
I used to work a lot — 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week… I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor…I loved telling people how “busy” I was…and how much I “had to do”. Sound familiar? Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse. One day I’d had enough. T
The psyche of a writer bounces wildly, hourly, from confidence to self-doubt, certainty to fear, love to angst. Wild times like these call for reassurance. Here are some of the reminders I keep for myself, 36 quotes to remind myself that writing is completely worthwhile, entirely fulfilling, and all the best kinds of difficult. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. – Walter Benjamin Annie Dillard has said that da
I recently re-read two books that had a big impact on my upbringing: The Alchemist and The Little Prince. Those two novels capture a fascinating concept: Serendipity. I love how the characters embark on journeys where they learn a lot by trying to find their own path, through many chance encounters and learnings. Outside of the fantasy world and back in our own reality , I got to wondering what these concepts look like in my own life. We all want to maximize our productivity, and many of us t
I like to think of myself as a “doer”—someone who can make things happen by himself. On occasion, I neglect the role that help from others has played and over-estimate the things I’ve achieved himself. Often, when I catch myself thinking like that, I’m a bit disappointed and I wish I was instead more connected to reality and the people around me. The most recent time I pondered on that topic, I decided to go through my life and re-collect the many incredible offers of generosity I was able to
My first day at Google in 2011 felt a bit like joining Hogwarts: you’re excited and not entirely sure what you’ll be doing! I was happy to do anything and learn in the process! For the next two years, I was lucky enough to train Google employees on Gmail and to pitch Gmail to companies of all sizes. Although I’m no longer affiliated with Google—I now work here at Buffer and on Remotive.io—I still use these 7 Gmail tips that have a daily impact on my work to this day. Tame Your Email: My 7 To
How many photos of you are on your phone right now? These days, humans take almost 1 trillion photos a year. (To put that into context, that’s more photos every few minutes than in the entire 19th century.) And lots of these photos are selfies—self-portraits, usually taken with a smartphone. As of this writing, nearly 300 million Instagram photos had been tagged with the selfie label. We love getting into the “whys” of social media psychology, so in this post I set out to discover why we love
One of Buffer’s values is working smarter, not harder, and the #bufferchat community gathered to offer tips and ideas on living smarter. How do you manage your energy throughout the day? What are your go-to productivity tips? Are there certain times of the day you produce your best work? Our community shared their thoughts with us! Catch the full recap here. What does “working smarter, not harder” mean to you? * “”Work smarter, not harder” for me means maximizing efficiency. W/ high levels
In the book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell provides a unique blueprint to understanding the success of such monolithic figures as the Beatles and Bill Gates. In one section, Gladwell illustrates the life of a Jewish immigrant family who came to New York after fleeing the Nazis in Europe. Despite such difficult circumstances, they found tremendous hope and meaning in starting a garment business together: “When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired, but he was his ow
Like millions before me I read How to Win Friends and Influence People and was blown away by the power of this book. I can’t believe that I hadn’t read it until recently and feel like I have wasted some precious opportunities to optimize certain situations in life. Some of the stories in the book were so incredible that they seemed almost too good to be true. I finished the book with two questions: * Will this work for me? * How can I optimize my life while also optimizing the lives of those
When I joined Buffer a few months ago, I figured my best chance to add value to the team would be to use my background in statistics, data and growth. But I recently had the opportunity to drop what I was working on and spend one of the final weeks of my Buffer boot camp solely on customer support for an entire week. It wasn’t a mandatory assignment; more a proposed journey to a different side of the company that could give me a new perspective of Buffer as a product and organization. Because
A few days ago, I was in bed, getting ready to fall asleep. Often when I’m lying in bed, I listen to a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on SoundCloud. I find his voice and insights very soothing and it helps me calm my thoughts down and go to sleep gently. That night again, I was listening to one of his talks called “The 4 Qualities of Happiness.” It started off with a great intro and ideas around how to live a happy life by grounding yourself and how to do it. It talked about what true freedom means,
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Rodolphe Dutel, Buffer team member and founder of Remotive, recently joined us to discuss remote working. Rodolphe has spent many months traveling and working from all corners of the globe and has even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. He brought many of his lessons learned, tools of the trade and general advice to #bufferchat! Catch all the great twee
In my recent travels around Asia, I’ve had the great opportunity to meet a lot of local founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. A few themes that seemed to come up many times are questions like “What triggered you to become passionate about company culture and transparency?” or “How did you know you wanted to build Buffer to what it is today?” One of the most memorable moments for me was talking to a super smart lady who is having a lot of success at a large company and longs to work on something
We never get tired of thinking about happiness, do we? Life is so much nicer when you’re able to couple it with joy and gratitude. We’ve published posts before about simple ways to be happy and retraining your brain for more gratitude, and Buffer’s CEO Joel has even shared his own daily to-do list for happiness. (There’s also our popular list of things to stop doing to be happier.) Meanwhile, science continues to study happiness, finding ever more specific and idiosyncratic ways we can bring j
If someone were to ask you about your happiest moment yesterday, would you have an answer? How about your happiest moment of 3 months ago? I’ve got an answer for at least 100 of my recent days – and a new perspective on gratitude, thanks to the 100 Happy Days project. The challenge couldn’t be simpler: Take a photo of just one thing that makes you happy each day for 100 days. I knew a bit of what was in store for me once I began chronicling my moments of happy because I first came to know th
The bookshelf in my office holds a single shelf of paperback books that are very special to me. Amidst the nearby clutter of boxes and miscellany (I find the bookshelf is seldom used for books anymore) sits a row of my favorite writing books and reference guides, stacked chronologically from the time I bought them, each one brought down once a year or so for a fun refresher. Some folks read the same novel multiple times for fun. I tend to read the same writing books [https://blog.bufferapp.com
It started out innocently enough. A busy week of errands and a particularly fun weekend filled with dancing, and there it was: A 7 day “streak” of hitting my goal of taking 10,000 steps per day, according to my Jawbone Up. (The Buffer team + family members all get a Jawbone Up as a gift, and we share our steps and sleep stats with each other. I love this because I think it is an amazing way to be super transparent and share our self-improvement efforts with each other. These are two of Buffer’s
