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Hi, I’m Donald and I’m passionate about optimizing life. I’ve been writing about personal effectiveness since 2006. Sign up below to get new tips and insights from me.

Maximize Your Personal Effectiveness
Purpose
Do what matters and meaningful to you.
Balance
Stay balanced in all aspects of your life.
Growth
Take your life to the next level.
Latest Posts
Check out the latest posts from the blog

Maximizing Your Personal Effectiveness With AI Tools: 4 Tips
Have you noticed a recent trend? More and better AI tools are becoming available. While AI (artificial intelligence) has been around for some time, the tools that came out recently are smarter than ever. DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, for instance, can generate relevant images based on your text prompts. And ChatGPT is surprisingly good at…

Ask the Readers: What Lessons Did You Learn in 2022?
Here we are near the end of 2022. Soon we will enter the year 2023. I think it’s a good time to reflect on what we have learned this year so that we can start the new year strong. For me, a lesson I learned is the importance of taking risks to make progress in…

Why a Passion for Learning Is Essential
What do you think is a key trait for thriving in this age? A good answer, I believe, is a passion for learning. Let me explain. I recently read Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein. It’s an insightful book about the history of finance. It covers topics such as the…

The Importance of Building Mental Models and How to Do It
I’m currently re-reading The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. I’ve read the book years ago, but I recently felt the need to read it again. The book summarizes important principles for businesses that it calls “mental models”. The term “mental model” was popularized by Charlie Munger, the investment partner of Warren Buffett. In short, mental…

Thriving Despite Adversity: A Lesson From Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler is one of the greatest mathematicians who have ever lived. Living in the 18th century, he contributed to many fields of mathematics. He was very prolific; when he passed away at the age of 76, he had more than 850 publications! Many of the mathematical notations that we use today were first introduced…

Being Creative: Four Keys From a Great Game Designer
I loved playing computer games. In fact, that’s how I first learned to code: by making simple games. Though I no longer spend much time on games these days, I’m still interested in the field. That’s why I was excited when I found the memoir of Sid Meier. You might never hear of him, but…