Good Life Project

Guest:  Sheryl O’Loughlin , the former CEO of Clif Bar, Co-founder of Plum Organics and author of Killing It: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Head Without Losing Your Heart . Sheryl is currently CEO of REBBL super-herb beverages. Story:  A rising star in the marketing world, Sheryl left a career in a mega-corp to join them fledgling CLIF Bar. She eventually rose to CEO, introduci...

Short answer: chill out. Slightly longer answer: Change the way you measure success, and run experiments. For the next handful of years or, who knows, maybe even the next decade, use a different metric. Instead of money, power, prestige, rank, relative wealth or any of those things, elevate self-discovery as your primary measure of success. Because if you don't do it now, you'll find yourself year...

Guest:   Andrew Forsthoefel is a writer, radio producer, public speaker, and author of Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time Story: At 23, Andrew walked out the back door of his home in Pennsylvania, with a backpack and a sign that read “Walking to Listen.” Some 4,000 miles and countless conversations later, he found himself on the West Coast. More important,...

What if you could get really good at almost anything in only 20 hours? Sounds like an impossible promise, but it's not. Accelerated learning hacker and author of  The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast! , Josh Kaufman , says anyone can do it. In today's special expanded Riff, Josh busts myths about what it takes to learn new things quickly. He then reveals a 5-step protocol to get...

Guest: Jen Sincero , #1 NY Times  bestselling author of  You are a Badass and You are a Badass at Making Money . Story: From playing in a band and living in a garage in Venice Beach, CA to building a career as an internationally acclaimed and massively successful writer on her own terms. Big idea(s):  Stepping into your true identity changes everything. Money is not the enemy, it is...

What if being a follower and not a leader was the perfect place for you to be? We've heard so much about how we all need to lead, to found, to build, to create. From relationships to careers to business to health to life. Being a follower is, in some way, considered being "less than." Something that those who won't or can't lead surrender to. But, being a follower, at the right time, for the right...

How do you know if you're addicted to your phone? Or maybe your favorite game, app, text, snapchat, Instagram, Facebook or online shopping? Is it even possible to be truly addicted to these things? You know, like on the level of drugs? Or are we all just being a bit too alarmist? Where is the line between a healthy obsession that adds to your life and an addiction to tech that can own and potentia...

Fifty years ago, in 1967, some 100,000 hippies came together in Haight-Ashbury for the famed Summer of Love. They gathered to celebrate an ethos of love, generosity the pursuit of meaning and expanded consciousness. While psychedelics were a not infrequent part of the culture, the bigger pursuit took the form of a counterculture revolution. It was about changing the dynamics of power, expression a...

The earliest signs of  Terry Wahls'  condition began to surface in med-school. An electric shock of unknown original seemed to randomly radiate across her face. But it would be many more years, deep into her practice as a physician, before additional symptoms would lead to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Within three years, she found herself largely confined to a tilt-recline whe...

Today, we're answering a powerful question from a listener who writes: "...how do you find a sense of place and home, when we live in an increasingly mobile world? This is a topic often discussed among people in the development community who move often. We all struggle with our sense of "home" and what that means. I also wonder if it is also a wider issue for entrepreneurs who do not need to neces...

Danielle LaPorte is soul-personified . I've known her for nearly a decade, and in that time, while so much has changed, one thing has remained consistent. Her fierce devotion to truth, to love, to kindness and the creation of beauty. Over that same time, she's left a trail of both massive successes and a few equally-notable misses. What I love about D is, she wouldn't have it any other way. Becaus...

Heard any of these? You have to take care of yourself, before you can take care of others. In an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first, or else you won't be in position to help those who rely on you to be okay. The purest form of service to others is when it comes form a place of complete selflessness. Yup, we've all heard them. I'n fact, I've uttered every single one. Truth is, the distinction...

To be amazing at any one thing, do you have to abandon everything and everyone else along the way? Or, is there a better way? That's the question that has obsessed with week's guest, Dan Lerner , for his entire adult life. The son of world-class classical musicians and an accomplished cellist himself at an early age, he was exposed to a world of devotion and mastery. He saw people in this communit...

How do you continue to grow, to honor the call of your "true self," when you're far enough into life that you've got responsibilities and people looking to you for some semblance of stability? When you don't want to rock that boat? Put another way... How do you do what you love when you don't want to blow up your life? This was the question asked by one of our listening community, a married parent...

Dani Shapiro is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels and four memoirs, including her latest,  Hourglass: Time, Memory, Money . A recent guest on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday, she's taught writing at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University. Dani is also the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy and a contributing editor at Con...

In the last month, two annual reports have come out that offer guidance on who the happiest and healthiest countries in the world are. They rank each in order. And, the results tend to be fairly consistent year-over-year. The nordic countries generally report being the happiest. The United States is somewhere in the middle. Similar […]The post Want to Live Longer? It’s a People Thing appeared firs...

Today's guest, Vanessa Van Edwards , is a behavioral investigator and founder of human behavior research lab, the Science of People . She's also known as a human lie-detector, master of influence and someone who has spent her adult life decoding human interaction, influence, social and power dynamics, charisma, likability and more. As a geeky, modern-day Dale Carnegie, Vanessa Van E...

Comes a time you’ve gotta get out of your head and just act. Maybe you want to change careers, start a company, learn to paint, start a relationship, write a book or mount any other potentially transformational endeavor. Think about it, ponder for a bit, suss out the basics, but then stop talking about it, […]The post Don’t Just Ship It appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acas...

Suicide or psychedelics? Those were the options this week's guest,  Ayelet Waldman , found herself facing. A married mother of four and novelist living in Berkeley, Waldman struggled with bipolar, anxiety and depression her entire life. According to her, mental illness ran wide and deep in her family. Over the years, she'd found a pharmaceutical regime that made life tolerable, until per...

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re living in uncertain times. And, that can have a pretty life-stifling effect on us. It can impact everything from state-of-mind to our physical health and even our creative and mental abilities. Question is, if you can’t change the immediate circumstance at work or in life, is there something […]The post Certainty Anchors: Finding Calm in a Stormy World appea...

Michelle Gielan , national CBS News anchor turned positive psychology researcher, is the Founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research. She is partnered with Arianna Huffington to study how transformative stories fuel success and is an Executive Producer of “The Happiness Advantage” Special on PBS and a featured professor in Oprah’s Happiness course. Michelle is also the best-selling...

There’s this mythology. Go all in. Don’t dabble. Don’t play. Don’t make it a hobby, make it your “one thing.” From the very beginning. Even if you have no idea if you’ll like it, how it’ll make you feel and whether it can ever really be what you’ve told yourself and the world you’re going […]The post The Experimental Life appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy f...

Born in Ghana, West Africa, Kute Blackson  was the child of a Japanese mother and a Ghanaian father who was a legendary faith leader with some 300 churches across Ghana and a massive following in the U.K. By his early teens, Kute was being groomed to rise up in his father’s church, but that would all change when Blackson rejected the path his father laid out for him and chose his own ins...

We are taught, from a young age, to exist in the middle. Everything in moderation. Don’t be a tall poppy, nor a shrinking violet. Good enough is good enough. The middle way, middle-class, mid-tier. That’s where we want to be. Not so big that we get cut down, and not so small that we can’t […]The post The Unfortunate Middle appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

You know that little button on Facebook you click to "like" something? Well, as one of the early employees at Facebook, today's guest, Leah Pearlman , came up with that idea. Actually, its original incarnation was the "awesome button," but what's more interesting is why she created it. And, what was going on in her life that led her to want it, both for herself and the millions of others flooding...