Mike Vardy

There’s a specific kind of realization that doesn’t announce itself as small. It shows up with weight attached — equal parts fascination and dread — and you know almost immediately that it’s asking something different of you than your average “oh, that makes sense” moment does. Most of us don’t have language for the difference. We call both of them an epiphany and move on.

Tom Griffiths titled his new book The Laws of Thought for a reason. For three hundred years, philosophers and scientists have tried to write down the rules our minds are supposed to follow, certain that if they could just get the logic right, human thinking would finally make sense. It ...

We talk about time like it’s a hallway. The past is the part behind us, the present is the door we’re currently standing in, and the future is a hallway stretching out ahead, waiting to be walked. It’s a useful enough metaphor for a calendar. It’s a fairly bad description of what’s actually happening when you’re alive.

In his...

There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens when a room full of accomplished people watches someone’s inbox on a screen and forgets what they came to learn. I watched it happen at a conference recently — a workshop about something else entirely, derailed for ten minutes because someone’s inbox had three messages in it. Nobody asked about the actual topic. Everyone wanted ...