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

Annie Duke was a World Series of Poker champion who became a best-selling author of books such as How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Tim Ferriss interviewed her and Duke shared how “poker had taught her to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn’t mean I failed, and just because I won…

I’ve started to read Admiral William H. McRaven’s book Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life… and the World where he shares lessons learned from an extraordinary life of service to our country. These are 72 words he wrote on courage I found inspiring: “Courage is a remarkable quality. Nothing and nobody can…

My son cooked us a wonderful “Cape Cod” style birthday dinner last night with grilled oysters and homemade lobster rolls as we watched the opening ceremonies at the Olympics. For dessert his fiancé made “chipwiches,” which are chocolate chip cookies broken in half with vanilla ice cream placed in the middle. And we observed if you…

I return weekly to read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. This morning he offered these five profound questions. “Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child’s?Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal…

Yesterday we celebrated my birthday by going to see Eno, a film about producer Brian Eno who has worked with musicians and bands like David Bowie, U2, the Talking Heads, and Coldplay. What’s fascinating about Eno is it’s generative, meaning a computer program call “Brain One” (an anagram of Brian Eno) creates a new version…

Roger Angell wrote wonderful books about baseball and was an essayist and editor at The New Yorker. His father in law was E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web.  I recently finished his book Let Me Finish where he wrote this, “The only piece of advice I ever got from William Shawn was something he said to me in…