What's Up Wednesdays: Comfort Zone

The only way you can know how far you can go is to risk going too far. While Joshua Wilner admits that there can be “great joy in the mundane parts… of our lives,” he is quick to remind us how dangerous it can be to stay in your comfort zone. Getting stuck in a routine simply because it is safe and comfortable means that you will never realize your true potential. What would you do with your life if money were no longer a concern?

Continuing along with this week’s speelink, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits explains to us why we should forget about new year’s resolutions and start focusing on creating rules instead. The problem with most new year’s resolutions is that they don’t come with a solid plan for how to achieve them. When you work to establish rules, they become habits and those positive habits will get you much closer to your actual goals. Take specific actions as consistently as you can.

If you’ve ever wondered about the secret to happiness, Tim Urban breaks it down very simply. Happiness is basically the relationship between expectations and reality. When reality fails to meet your expectations, you’re unhappy. When reality is even better than what you expected, you’re happy. This is at the core of the problem facing Generation Y, because we may have come to expect too much. This relates back to what I had written previously about Law of Jante and how people portray themselves on Facebook.

Vancouver’s Chinatown has undergone significant changes in recent years, shifting away from its history as the place to go grocery shopping for the local Chinese population. Today, it’s more of a tourist attraction and one that is increasingly overrun by the modernity of the hipster population. John Atkin points out the several failed architectural design choices that have resulted in trying to honor the historic nature of the area while erecting new structures meant to be hip and cool.

And finally, we step back into my uncomfortable comfort zone as a father with Darrell Milton. There is a growing movement online exclaiming that dads don’t babysit; it’s called parenting. As Darrell points out, though, dads really do babysit… it’s just not exactly in the way that you might think.