Your brain is not being helpful

• "Yes, I can do that!" is a trap. Early in your career, raising your hand to take on more is rewarded. It's how you get faster growth and more scope, delivering on the gnarly projects that nobody else wants. But that can-do attitude becomes a trap as you grow more senior. Your time becomes more valuable and more in demand. If you say yes to everything you _can_ do, you won't have time or energy for the most important work that _only_ you can do.

• Managing yourself is an essential component of effective leadership. People often think that leadership is about getting people to report to you so you can manage their work. But they forget to manage their most important employee: themself.

• Working harder is not the answer. In working with extraordinary leaders both at Google and as an executive coach, I’ve seen that the most successful leaders are not the ones that work the hardest - they are the ones who thoughtfully invest their time and energy by ruthlessly prioritizing the work where they can deliver the most value. They get work done through others by building coalitions of mutual success where everybody benefits, aka the Executive Mindset.
• What have you been thinking, but not saying? Tension is created when there is a disconnect between what we are internally thinking and what we are sharing with others. They feel that tension, and come up with their own stories of what might be behind the tension, projecting their own worst fears. Releasing that tension and letting go of those fears requires us to talk about what's happening.
• Sharing your truth can be a transformational act. Sometimes it doesn't feel like we have a choice because we "have to" do something. But we always have a choice if we acknowledge that there are options that might have consequences we aren't currently willing to accept. By sharing our situation with somebody we trust, they can help us find choices and possibilities we don't even consider, because they are not trapped by the same beliefs that we are.

• I don't have a take on Charlie Kirk. Go read the thoughtful takes of Charlie O'Donnell or Lexi Reese or Garrett Bucks.
• I also don't have a take on Jimmy Kimmel. Go read what Ijeoma Oluo's perspective that most people of color never had the right to speak freely or do what they want without getting punished by the state. She hopes that maybe this powerful white man being disciplined "could do us all a favor and wake us up from the dangerous illusion of individual rights already."
• Tim Cheadle's reflection on Learning to Live Slowly during a career break is a great description of how his mind was stuck in thinking that only productivity would keep him safe:

• How Social Media Shortens Your Life by Gurwinder is another example of how letting our brain do what's easy or convenient (like scrolling) will cause us to be less present: "a sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past." This is particularly insidious because "people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. So, by speeding up time on social media, attention engineers don’t just make you waste more time, they might also reduce your likelihood of regretting it." But he offers a prescription: "To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral."