In her youth, Hemingway lived in fear of falling prey to what she calls “… the Hemingway legacy of mental illness, addiction, and eating and drinking to excess.” Eating a no-fat, low-protein, and carbohydrate-rich diet that kept her looking thin for the cameras, Hemingway, by her own admission, also drank caffeine like a fiend and exercised obsessively. “I loved the energy I got from coffee and then I would jump rope for hours in my apartment after working out at the gym,” she recalls. “Because I didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, I thought I was the healthiest, cleanest-living person in the world, until I got to the point where I had zero energy, my menstrual periods stopped, and tests revealed that in addition to low thyroid function, I was vitamin-deficient.”

The alarm clock jars you awake at some insanely early hour. As you hit the snooze button you think, "there's gotta be a better way to make a living." As someone who rolled out of bed this morning at 8:30, I'm here to deliver the good news: there is.

By Robert White.   One of the most powerful pieces of writing that I’ve ever seen is from Marianne Williamson’s book A Return to Love. It was quoted by Nobel Prize–winner Nelson Mandela in his inaugural address... Listen closely and consider your own life as you listen to Marianne’s words. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world..."

Being seduced by the comfort of routine and the known is one of the ways we limit ourselves and inhibit social change. Conservative thinking on both a personal and political level may feel safe, but can nurture stagnation. Doing more about our inertia, we can grow more effectively toward who we want to be, and help our institutions evolve.

Are people fascinated by so much in the world because of their intellectual development, or does consciously feeding our mind stimulate high level thought and creative ability? Steve Pavlina, for example, writes, "Leonardo da Vinci, considered a genius by any reasonable standard, achieved competence across a diverse set of fields, including art, music, science, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and many others. While some would argue that such wide-ranging interests were a result of his intelligence, I think it is more likely that they were the cause of it - or at least a major contributing factor."

By Yee-Ming Tan, Positive Psychology News Daily -- Do strengths translate well to workplaces in China? I run positive leadership workshops in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and recently came across an experience in which the strengths-approach was challenged. Often a good debrief is required before the individuals can fully make sense of what to do with his or her strengths.

And so creative people tend to make the audience, a studio, their agent into a parent figure that they have to constantly appease or impress to maintain the connection, the emotional tie... You kind of do and you don’t [have to have a really big ego]... A friend of mine said, talking about writers, they’re egomaniacs with low self-esteem.