Chris Loper has been writing about self-improvement and helping busy adults with habit formation since 2017. He also writes an education blog for parents and students for Northwest Educational Services. Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the cocreator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of transformative classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families. His most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more. In 2021, Chris published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons. He lives in Issaquah, WA where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.
Over the years, I have come to embrace being weird. However, I don’t mean weird for weird’s sake. My weird has a purpose. Despite how I sometimes appear, I am not heeding the advice of Robin Williams, who said: “You got to be crazy. It’s too late to be sane. Too late. You got to go full tilt bozo. Cause you’re only given a little spark of madness, and if… Read More »Be Weird
Yesterday morning I listened to this episode of the podcast Hidden Brain. In it, researcher Ming Kuo discusses the findings that show how we benefit socially, psychologically, and physically from spending time in nature. Green spaces reduce social conflict, increase mental health, lower blood pressure, and improve immunity. This was not news to me: I already knew about the many benefits of spending time in nature, both from personal experience… Read More »The Power of Daily Wisdom
I’ve written before about the surprising power of 20 seconds, also known as “The 20-Second Rule.”1 This is probably my favorite life-hack. The 20-Second Rule is simple: If you make something just 20 seconds easier to do, you’ll be much more likely to do it. And if you make something just 20 seconds harder to do, you’ll be much less likely to do it. There’s nothing special about 20 seconds… Read More »The 20-Second Rule Revisited
It’s cliché to say that you can’t please everyone. But this is precisely the sort of sanity-restoring wisdom that we all understand to be true, and we all routinely forget. So here’s a little gem that has been helping me remember … and causing me to quietly chuckle to myself whenever I think of it: You are not the jackass whisperer. This wisdom comes to us from author Scott Stratten,… Read More »You Are Not the Jackass Whisperer