Self-Improvement - Page 4
A collection of posts on Self Improvement
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
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 This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes.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 tweets fro
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 beca
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
About 2-3 years ago, I decided I wanted to start to declutter my life gradually. I went from one backpack and a carry-on bag to just one backpack. I count the following things as my belongings at this point: * 6 T-shirts * 2 sweaters, 2 hoodies * 1 coat * 2 pairs of dress-pant sweat-pants * 6 pairs of socks and boxer shorts * 1 backpack * An iPhone, a Kindle, 1 notepad and a MacBook Air (+ keyboard and mouse) * Gym shoes and gym shorts * Various toiletries like toothbrush, contact lens
The other day, I was at the gym with my co-founder Joel and we started a short discussion about other products as part of Buffer’s product offering we might enjoy building one day. We went through various problems we’d enjoy solving, like online payments, social media monitoring and so forth. At one point, we got into some light brainstorming of one of the areas and the name of a related, prominent startup in the space came up. I said “I know the founder.” That line had nothing to do with the
To kick off the first #Bufferchat of 2015, the Buffer team joined in as guests for a chat focused on goal setting and tracking tips and tools. With personal improvement as one of our 10 company values, it is a topic near and dear to our hearts. Check out the full Storify recap here. What are your goals for 2015? * Sunil: “Personal goal for 2015: Would love to bring back meditation as a habit again. Last year was on and off for me. Also hoping to eat healthier, w/ more protein and reducing t
We find that self-improvement and reading go hand-in-hand. Many of the books we seem to grab at Buffer tend to be related to our current tasks, our new ideas, our passions and pursuits, or even just a nice sampling of good writing and entertaining topics to keep us tuned in and engaged. We end up reading a deep and wide assortment of inspiring stuff. As a team, we read 656 books in 2014. I’m happy to share the 19 most popular ones from our reading list. Note: One of the neat perks we have o
I have a lot of things I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. Some of them are really small things (like learning to make hashbrowns, a breakfast food that has confounded me for years) and some are really big, like learning to live a more minimalist life. In the past, I have begun each new year with great intentions but found following through really difficult—like many of those who create goals for the new year. I think that’s because change is hard. We all want to improve and become bett
“Those that get up at 5 a.m. rule the world.” – Robin Sharma Those who know me, know that I love my morning routine. I’m always making adjustments to it, and at its core it revolves around waking up early (before sunrise), working on something important for 90 minutes, and then hitting the gym. I recently shared my most recent routine in a blog post about creating new habits. Today, I want to share a couple of things about my routine that I’ve neglected to mention in previous articles. These t
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle I’ve been obsessed with thinking about, adjusting and building upon my habits for a long time now, and working on good habits is probably one of the things that’s helped me the most to make progress with my startup. In addition, it seems like habits are now becoming popular again. This is a great thing, and books like The Power of Habit are helping lots of people. Perhaps one of the things that is rarely
Speaker, podcaster and career coach DJ Waldow recently joined us for #bufferchat to discuss living your passion. See the full Storify recap here. What does it mean to live your passion? From DJ: * “Living your passion: Do What You Love | Love What You Do – This@ugmonk t says it all: http://instagram.com/p/rKOeUPx8k5/ “
“You choose to be at the single place on earth where you are the happiest and most productive, and you are not afraid to find out where that is.” This beautiful sentiment comes from the Buffer culture slidedeck , the document that defines the values behind everything we do at Buffer. One of the 10 Buffer values is to “Live smarter, not harder,” and this involves finding that single place on earth where you can be your best. A few months a
If you look at our culture deck on Slideshare , you’ll quickly find that our first and likely most pronounced value is “Always choose positivity and happiness.” We have this as a very central theme in the way we work, live and how we hire here at Buffer. It’s one of the things that gives me the most fulfillment of working towards. It’s also one of the hardest and most aspirational values to live up to.
The other day I was discussing with my teammate and friend Carolyn how it had been months since the last time I attended a yoga class. I’ve been thinking about it occasionally and getting annoyed with myself for not practicing—almost feeling stressed. Like many other things—for example, blogging —I often ind it incredibly hard to get back to things that I “should” be doing. The str
A while back, my co-founder Leo gave me an interesting suggestion: he said I should try disabling all notifications on my iPhone. I find this suggestion especially interesting because it is one that goes against the normal phone setup. It’s so usual to stick to how things are, and with iPhone apps the easiest thing to do is to “allow” all those notifications. It seems almost odd to even consider doing things any other way. I chose to go along with Leo’s suggestion, although I was admittedly q
Rest, and think. What does your ideal day look like? When do you wake up ? Who do you spend time with? What do you do? What does your ideal work look like? What do you create? How does it make you feel? Where are you [https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-optimize-your-environment-for-creat
Have you ever discovered a life hack just when you needed to hear it? The timing and the solution perfect, and the next step so obvious that you acted immediately and have stuck with it ever since? When it comes to health, sweeping life changes are especially difficult to implement and even harder to sustain. But in my experience, it’s the small changes you adopt, maintain, and love that add up to a meaningful long-term difference. I’ve been collecting a list of these kinds of fitness, diet, h
In February, my husband and I jumped head-first into urban farming — starting our summer garden from seeds. It then developed into an even larger endeavor when we added 13 chicks into our home. And then four ducks. And then three more chickens… The past several months have been a blur between brooding chicks, building coops, free-ranging, fixing fencing, gardening and finding eggs. As I look back upon these summer months, several distinct themes come to mind — and boy, do they ripple beyond ou