Overview If a swami clad in ochre robes told you to forsake your family and study yoga to achieve eternal enlightenment, would you do it? In Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), Indian monk and guru Paramahansa Yogananda describes the spiritual path that led him to leave India for the United States to spread the practice of kriya yoga in the early twentieth century. Kriya yoga centers primarily on meditation, with the goal of using the breath to achieve unity between mind, body, and spirit. Yogananda knew from the time he was a child that he wanted to follow a sacred path. He believed he was destined to spread Hindu principles for achieving spiritual unity throughout Western countries, where Eastern philosophy was not yet well known. Yogananda’s autobiography provides a look at the early influences that shaped his future practice as a guru, as well as first-hand descriptions of the miracles he either witnessed or performed throughout his quest to become a swami, or Hindu religious leader. B...

Have yourself a mindful morning Many of us often feel that our mornings slip away without accomplishing much. Laura Vanderkam acknowledges this state of helplessness, where we have our sights on the clock but tackle less essential activities, sidelining the important stuff. Drawing from her personal experience, Laura Vanderkam cites the challenges she faces every morning while juggling her responsibilities as a mother and creating the right state of mind for the workday. Like her, we encounter the same problems daily. It is one thing to be out of bed early and another — to find a way around the numerous hurdles we might face before we start working. Even when we eventually get ourselves to work in one piece, it is common to waste time on less relevant tasks, like replying to emails or looking through shallow content online. Instead of subjecting our mornings to mindless tasks, Laura Vanderkam lists three categories of activities that should define our mornings: • Cultivate your career ...

  Part I: Questions for Better: DECISION-MAKING We can’t rely on our instincts when making decisions, as they are subject to biases and irrational risk aversion. We must instead use evidence and outside sources to make better decisions. The question method allows us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know. It helps us step forward in the face of uncertainty. We are wired to make quick, instinctive decisions, but it is important to think carefully about important decisions. When making decisions, we are prone to falling into a raft of traps, according to the researchers John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. These traps include fear of the unknown, overconfidence in our own forecasts, and an inclination to favor information that confirms our preexisting assumptions and biases. The first thing to do with that flashlight is to turn it on yourself. The path to better decision-making begins by questioning your own beliefs, biases, and assumptions. It is difficult to d...

Loyalty has a vital place in the matters of nation-building As a citizen of a nation, there are many things expected of you; the paramount of those expectations is loyalty—for the country and its interests. For a regular person, this quality is admirable, but it is a matter of life and death for a member of the secret service. Loyalty to your country is an essential quality in any individual; it keeps the nation growing and united. This reality was the case with a Russian spy, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB agent born into the KGB, loved, formed, and almost destroyed. He was loyal to Mother Russia and the secret service. He loved his country and bought into the false message of uniting the world under the peaceful communal reign of the Soviet Union and thought joining its secret service would help him change the world. Loyalty can also be detrimental to the citizen as it is beneficial to the nation if done blindly. His loyalty, though, was blinding; he couldn’t see that he was fighting for the...

What’s in it for me? Get yourself a real financial education. What did your parents teach you about life, money and finding a career? Did they tell you you should go to school, study hard, and get a good job afterwards? Probably. Believe it or not, though, that’s not actually great advice – but it is what most parents tell their kids, and most school teachers too. Oh, while we’re speaking of school, here’s another question for you: while you were there – what did you learn about making money? If it was anything like most schools, then the answer is probably nada, zilch, nothing. No need to fret, though: most of us had the same experience. We’re never taught what you need to know to get, and stay, rich. But that information does exist: rich families pass it down from generation to generation. But how do you get access to it? In school, we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn we learn by making mistakes...