a daily blog on well-being and how to feel better by Mark Barger Elliott…

Yesterday I was watching the women’s 100 meter Olympic race that included US favorite Sha’Carri Richardson. The announcer explained as they lined up that this race had a “fresh podium,” meaning none of the previous Olympic stars were involved as they had either not made their teams, retired, or were injured. The idea of a…

“Throughout my career,” writes Admiral William H. McRaven in his book Make Your Bed, “I always had great respect for the British Special Air Service, the famed SAS. The SAS motto was ‘Who Dares Wins.’ To me the motto was more than about how the British special forces operated as a unit; it was about…

Rich Roll is a podcaster, author, recovering addict, and a vegan endurance athlete. One insight he offers that I really appreciate is, “Until it happens big, it happens small.”  Sometimes it can feel like we aren’t making significant progress towards a goal we set in our life. And we wonder why it’s taking so long.…

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor from 160-180 AD. He kept a journal of his reflections on life and leadership in a book called, Meditations. In one section he offers this helpful insight on how to manage our emotions:  “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will…

I continue to read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching throughout the week. Yesterday I read this: “You can’t know it, but you can be it,  at ease in your own life.” Likely we have all felt a longing to be “at ease in our own life.” The insight here is knowledge doesn’t necessarily provide or…

There is an approach to existence called determinism where, as Benjamín Labatut writes in When We Cease to Understand the World, we can think “everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state.” It was Walter Heisenberg who discovered that we actually exist in a world with a “spectrum of probabilities.” In particular,…