Are you familiar with Steve Pavlina’s blog? No? Well you should be. He’s a bona fide personal development guru and he’s been a huge source of inspiration and motivation for me. I recently finished reading his book “Personal Development for Smart People” and found myself nodding along with everything written. His blog is a veritable [...]
The End of a 30-day Challenge and an Inspirational Story
May 4th, aka Star Wars Day, was the last day of eating an entirely vegan diet as well as attempting to not eat after 7:00 PM. Eating vegan was, in a word, easy. I was mostly vegan prior to this month due to my lack of the lactase enzyme. Eliminating eggs and meat from my [...]
Getting started is scary as hell, but it needs to happen.
I was called out on my behavior recently by two different people. I’m stalling. I’m waiting. I’ve been wasting my time. Talk about a punch to the gut. Over the past few months, I’ve taken the time to invest in myself. I’ve been writing nearly every day, Invested in the Trailblazer course, read well over [...]
Do I Have to Write, or Do I Just Want to Write?
This question was posed to me in epistolary form by Christopher Hitchens. In his Letters to a Young Contrarian, he mentions this philosophy in passing, as an afterthought. But it stuck with me through the rest of the book and I had to write it down immediately in my notebook. This isn’t some tautology. There [...]
Turning Pro
I haven’t written because I don’t want to write shit. I wrote that a few days ago in my moleskine as a rationalization about why I haven’t been keeping my 1000 words/day goal. There’s some truth behind the statement, but it’s not the whole story. The truth is that I’m a bit lost with this [...]
My Path is Unknown, but I Know What It Isn’t. And Other Random Updates
My stomach was in knots the more I listened to her speak. The path she praised is not the one for me, and I knew it in my gut. We had an alumnus of my PhD program come to school and talk about her experience in industry. She offered to have a roundtable discussion with [...]
One thing ends, another doesn’t, and something else begins.
I had a different sort of post in mind for today but life has a way of shoving monkey wrenches into the gears of the best laid plans. My effort at living in complete congruence with my physical and digital selves is going to be put on hold for another week. Evidently there was a [...]
From Fake Honesty to Real Honesty
With as much emphasis as I place on honesty, you think I’d do a better job of it sometimes. My life is somewhat of a lie right now. It’s not a lie in the sense that I’m intentionally deceitful or manipulating people to get what I want. Rather, I’m guilty of the lie of omission. [...]
Every muscle tense to fence the enemy within
I’m not giving in to security under pressure. I’m not missing out on the promise of adventure. I’m not giving up on implausible dreams. Experience to extremes. Those are lyrics from an excellent Rush song titled The Enemy Within. This song has resonated with me very strongly over the past few weeks because of the [...]
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About Me
Welcome to Engineering the Uncommon. I'm Taylor and this is my blog. I write about topics that interest me as well as ways to live consciously, deliberately, awesomely, and without limitations. Spend some time checking out the content and please feel free to contact me through, email, Twitter, or Google+.
