Down on William Street in my hometown of Stratford, Ontario, grand Victorian houses and emerald green lawns back on to the Avon river that cut the city in half. When the sun rose on a recent summer’s morning, a mist surrounded early morning strollers walking briskly on the banks, sidestepping the…

It sounds a bit cliché to say that you remember something… “like it was just yesterday” when that something actually happened nearly 25 years ago. But I really do. Not necessarily because it was so surprising (though indeed it was) but because it showed me still once again that when…

A Consumer Reports survey revealed that 86% of people who had wills or other estate documents had not updated them within the past five years. Out-of-date estate plans can wreak havoc on your family. Much can happen in five years. For instance, last year Congress made major changes to the…

Before Timothy Ferriss became famous for writing The 4-Hour Workweek, he won a martial arts championship in China. He also set a world record for tango dancing.He won the Chinese kickboxing contest by taking advantage of a loophole in the rules… he used his size to push his smaller opponents off…

Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt was the second wealthiest American ever. Adjusted for the size of the economy, he was estimated to be worth $143 billion in 2007 dollars. The only wealthier American was oil man John D. Rockefeller, who amassed a fortune of nearly $192 billion. Both men were wealthier…

I’ve had lots of ups and downs. The bad times in my life have come when I’ve gone against the rules and as a result, I lost everything.A rule is a fact. It works whether you believe it or not. For example, pi will always equal 3.1415…. That’s a rule.And…

We’ve all heard the phrase, “No regrets!”, usually uttered when about to do something a little unwise perhaps. And yet, as alluring as the “Living Without Regrets” philosophy sounds, it’s not always so easy. We regret missed opportunities. We regret things that made us feel dumb. We regret not telling…

Everywhere we look in business, timetables once measured by calendars can now be clocked by egg timers. So how can we keep up? In a word — and according to an ever-increasing pile of evidence — “flow.” Technically defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best…

There’s one thing you need to do today to start improving your health: get a good night’s sleep. Sleep has been on my list of the top ways to improve your health for 9 years. In fact, it held the #1 spot for 8 out of those 9 years, until this…

In the first part of this series we talked about how even successful people often succumb to temptation. Plus we went over three experiments that showed “why” you can’t rely on willpower alone to stick to a new habit.  And we finished off with a simple exercise for building up your…

Willpower is a concept that’s often misunderstood. It’s easy to give credit to willpower when you successfully build a new habit, but it’s also equally easy to chalk up a failure due to a lack of willpower. So what is willpower? How does it affect your ability to stick to a new…