By Leo Babauta Last week, my brother was hit by an unimaginable tragedy: he lost his 3-month-old baby Tyler. I’m still in shock and heartbreak, coming to terms with it. My heart is broken for him, for all of our family, and for this terrible loss. I didn’t know Tyler, but as I be … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta We don’t like chaos. It is uncertainty, overwhelm, a feeling of groundlessness, being unmoored, out to sea without a compass. And it usually triggers a shut-down response in us: hide, avoid, procrastinate, try to get control, anxiety, or wanting to give up. Or not … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Lately my life has felt pretty chaotic: lots of projects, calls, and creation, along with helping loved ones with things, and preparing to move once again to a new home. Chaos can be beautiful! And I’m embracing it. But it can be hard to embrace chaos when we’re fe … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Earlier this week, Eva and I hopped on a last-minute flight to take care of some family business. We each had our lightweight backpacks and nothing else, so it was a relatively easy trip. On the flight back, I reflected on how flexible we had to be on this last-min … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta With the world in so much flux these days, many of us are noticing how difficult it can be to deal with ever-changing plans. It’s always been a challenge, but as with so many things, it’s become an in-your-face challenge these days. Some people really struggle when … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta In a quiet room, we can find stillness. And in that stillness, we can contemplate our own mind. What we often find is that the mind is very restless. It wants to take care of a thousand things, because it’s feeling some uncertainty and fear. It wants to fix problem … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Does your filing system include stacks of paper, or is your “To Be Filed” folder overflowing? If you have trouble with filing your documents, you may need to find a way to simplify your filing system to keep yourself organized. Filing is something many people have … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Often when our lives have a bunch of things going on at once, and multiple things to manage in each of those areas … it can feel really messy and scattered. This kind of feeling of messiness can cause us stress, and make us unhappy with our current situation. We mi … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta If you’re someone who tends spin out into a meltdown, rage, shutdown, or anxiety attack, things can be really difficult. A small frustration or fear can be turned into something huge, and ruin your entire day. If this is you, know that you’re not alone. This happen … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta I spend a lot of time dreaming about things — incredible adventures I want to go on, self-improvement projects, all those books I plan on reading! And there’s nothing wrong with that. Dreaming is wonderful. What I’ve noticed, though, is that sometimes I get stuck i … | Continue reading
By LEO BABAUTA Earlier this year, I started writing a beta version of my new book on training yourself to do your meaningful work … and I got 1,000 people to volunteer to be beta testers! It was a ton of fun. Then I fell off my writing, because of a number of projects that demand … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Lately I’ve been buying a lot of things: a nice watch, some cool folding knives, some tools and outdoor gear. It’s fun! But as I give in to these impulse purchases, I notice that the thrill doesn’t last that long, and it leaves me wanting more. And of course it daw … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta One of our deepest desires is for freedom: to be free of stress, anxiety, a frustrating person, a difficult situation, financial struggles, health problems, the daily grind, distractions, feeling inadequate. So many books, products and other paid solutions offer a … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta As I came back to work after a month off, I noticed myself feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of work in front of me. I felt a ton of resistance, and stress about how much work had to be done. A perfect practice ground for me! In this article, I’m going to […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta So I took the whole month of June off, just as I did in December — I’m standing for time off not only for myself, but as something I think is important for everyone. It wasn’t easy to take this month off. I had to make arrangements, sell it to my team […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta One thing I’ve learned about myself in the last year or so is how much I shut down what I want. Somehow the world taught me that what I want is not acceptable, that I should only want what seems reasonable, doable, or won’t inconvenience others. So I rarely even ac … | Continue reading
A lot of people I work with struggle to dive into their meaningful work because they get stopped up by beliefs they have about finding a purpose. I can’t find my purpose because I don’t have the time, I am not good enough, I don’t have any clarity, I’m not ready, I don’t have the … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta I have clients who really set high standards for themselves: they want to write amazing blog posts, create inspiring music, profound works of art, a thriving business that reaches hundreds of thousands of people. These are beautiful aspirations, and I love what we … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Many of us face things every day that stress us out: overwhelming number of tasks, a big meeting, a project that feels really tough, behind on paying bills, someone is upset at us, there’s a family crisis, the world feels chaotic. Can we find a way to be relaxed in … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Most of the people I know and work with want a life of meaning and purpose, not a life where we just get by … A well lived life, that feels meaningful. But this isn’t taught in schools, and most of us feel completely unsure of how to move towards this. I’m […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta A member of my Fearless Training Program has a full-time business that she loves, but isn’t the meaningful work she’d like to do in the world. She struggles with finding enough time for that meaningful work. Can you relate to this? The rest of our life fills up all … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Most of us have a troubled relationship with uncertainty, often without even knowing it. Our most difficult problems often stem from uncertainty: procrastination, overwhelm, distraction, anxiety, frustration with others, beating ourselves up, trouble with forming ( … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta The tendency to put off difficult tasks that we don’t want to face is almost universal. And it turns out, the moment of starting a task is often so much harder than actually doing the task. Once we get started, there can be challenges (and we will want to switch to … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta As a husband, a father, a man … one of the things I crave most is for my loved ones to trust me. It’s something I want with my team, my readers, my coaching clients, the members of my Sea Change and Fearless Training programs. And I’ve worked hard over the years to … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta At the end of a day of work, there can be a simple practice of wrapping things up and shutting down for the day. But so many of us feel guilty at simply stopping, and this feeling that we should be doing more … it drives some of us to keep going […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta One of the most common fears of anyone who is creating something, whether it’s online content or art or a new business or startup … is the fear of putting our work out there in the world. It’s a fear that has us procrastinating, researching endlessly, checking soci … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta I’ve come to the realization that most of us don’t allow ourselves to feel joy most days. Sure, maybe on some kind of big occasion, we’ll let ourselves run around whooping with joy … but mostly not. Think about you past week: have they been joyful and wondrous? Or … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Our old lives are gone, and the new world has not been created yet. We’re in an in between state right now, and this can feel really shaky for a lot of us. There is a way that this in-between state, before the new reality emerges, can cause us to distract ourselves … | Continue reading
This entire blog, and all my ebooks, are uncopyrighted (since January 2008). That means I’ve put them in the public domain, and released my copyright on all these works. There is no need to email me for permission — use my content however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Recently a couple of our loved ones died, and my family have been hit by grief and loss. I’ve been letting myself feel it as much as I can, and letting it bring our family closer together. It’s not the only time death has hit our loved ones in recent years — […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta When we get into a situation that feels uncertain, most of us will immediately try to get to a place of certainty. Instead of writing a blog post, I’ll find myself wanting to check emails or my favorite websites. Instead of having a difficult conversation, we’ll st … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta When life is shaking us up and we’re feeling stressed … it can be tough to feel resilient. Resilience helps us to deal with the chaos and overwhelm … but how to we create it when we feel like we’re underwater? The first step is to remove things that are adding unne … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Our lives can be chaotic and overwhelming, and we can feel like we’re struggling to stay afloat. We feel behind, stressed, distracted, undisciplined, unworthy. And in the middle of all of this, we want to do our meaningful work. We want to create an impact. How can … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Let’s say you want to be more disciplined about your day … you might tell yourself, “I’m going to wake every morning, meditate for 15 minutes, plan my Most Important Tasks, and then get started and follow the plan. No doubts about it.” And then your plan gets hit b … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta For the first 40 days of this year, I jumped in a cold swimming pool with two of my sons, as a practice in facing discomfort and fear. We never looked forward to it, but it taught me a lot about facing things I don’t want to face. The things we don’t […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta There’s a big part of us that doesn’t like chaos: we want order and simplicity and feeling like we’re on top of things and doing things the “right” way. And so when things feel chaotic, we scramble for some kind of stability: When we feel overwhelmed and behwend, w … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta There once was a young man named Brabu, who discovered at a young age he had a superpower: he could make things move just by waving his hands. Brabu found delight in this at first, making sticks and leaves float in the air, playing wildly in the forests and ocean, … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta We tend to go through our days with our noses to the grindstone, doing tasks, getting distracted, jumping from one thing to the next. Go to sleep tired, repeat the next day. Our days become an endless cycle of getting stuff done and getting through to the next day … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Sometimes it can feel like we’re stuck in life, doing the same things we’re unhappy with, over and over again. Maybe you’ve been procrastinating on your meaningful work, or getting stuck in indecision or perfectionism. Maybe you’ve been putting off exercise or medi … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Are you suffering from information addiction? It’s a growing problem as people spend more and more of their time online — and while online tools are amazing, being addicted to checking them can steal most of your day. You know you’re an information addict if you: C … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta In this chaotic world, we worry, we avoid, we try so hard to “do it right.” At the heart of it, all of that worry and anxiety is because we cannot trust. We don’t trust others: we judge them and try to tell them how to live their lives, we get frustrated […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Today my sons & I were standing at the edge of the pool, on a cold day, knowing that the water we were about to jump into was freezing. It was Day 27 of my first 40-day discomfort challenge … and we were dreading the cold water. We knew it would be […] | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Every day, we are dealing with a thousand things, overrun by emails and messages and tasks and chores … and it can become overwhelming and shut us down. I’d like to talk about an idea I’ve been working with, called the Stateless Protocol. It’s meant to reduce the o … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta This year, I’m doing a series of 40-day discomfort challenges, as a way to continue my training in falling in love with discomfort and uncertainty. It’s a training I’ve been doing for 1 1/2 decades now, but I’ve been deepening into it even more in the last 5 years. … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta Most of us have something on our task list we’re avoiding. Or a project we’ve been putting off. Think for a moment: what’s the task or project you’ve been avoiding lately? Some possibilities: That report you don’t want to write Your book or blog you’ve been meaning … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta At the beginning of every year, it’s like a blank slate: the year can be whatever you want it to be. This is freeing, exhilarating, magical. Take advantage of it, my friends. Of course, we always have the magic of a fresh start available to us — in any day, any hou … | Continue reading
By Leo Babauta What a freaking year it’s been. I don’t need to tell you. It’s been chaos and grief and frustration and anxiety and much more. It’s also been a year of growth for me, and for my mission. In fact, in that area, it’s been one of the best years ever. In this […] | Continue reading
Every moment is already perfect and doesn't need to be improved. But our experience of the moment can be fraught with difficulty, and we have the power to create a new experience in each moment. | Continue reading