How do we want to be admired, and what things do we do in pursuit of that admiration? It is easy to rely on symbols and associations to promote our individuality and worth, but the best strategy has always been, and always will be, to actually be admirable, independent of those things. Influences: Elephants, Rap Music, Ambition Website: skippingsto…

Standards, apathy, joy, happiness, freedom, religion, and nautical metaphors. What would we be willing to die for and why should we even bother caring about anything? Influences: Star Wars, Ukraine, Trees, Boat Anchors, and Unanchored People Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.com…

How can a person stay connected to reality when they have no one around them but worshippers and opportunists? Are these the right people for us to be placing on pedestals? Influences: The “Me Too” Movement, Tabloids Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.comVon Seth Roberts

What things do you spend your time and attention on that are not moving you closer to where you want to be? The cost is high when we fail to properly estimate the value of things in our lives. Influences: Benjamin Franklin Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.comVon Seth Roberts

Are we trying to convince ourselves of our own importance by pursuing status? Is it even possible to give up status? Maybe, in the end, the only status that matters is that which is associated with having lived a good life. Influences: Hair Salons, Money, Jesus Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.com…

Simple kindness begins with a hello. We take the simplest greeting for granted, but it exists because it has value. Consider giving a stranger the gift of acknowledging their existence. Influences: Small Towns, High School, and The South Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.comVon Seth Roberts

Arguing is a performance, not a way to bring your someone to your side. Arguing, persuading, competition, 2-Year-Olds and more. What is the key to bringing a person to your side and to finally get someone to listen to what you have been saying?? Influences: A lifetime of fighting with people and a 2-year-old Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: inf…

How much "stuff" do we actuall need in our lives? How much of what we want comes from what we see other people wanting, and what possessions are actually making us happy? It is worth evaluating what in our life is worth keeping. Influences: Robinson Crusoe, Keeping up with the Joneses, RVs, and Funerals Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@ski…

All girls are princesses, even if they live in dirty old attics! Little girls deserve to be cherished deeply by their fathers, so when it is time for another man to enter their life as an adult, they know what it feels like to be cherished by a man. Influences: The Little Princess, My Daughter, Jesus, and Fathers Website: skippingstonessr.com Email…

Coming to recognize the truth about ourselves is a never-ending process. Whatever we may want to believe about a situation will never overrule what is actually true about it. It is easy for us to participate in self-deceiving behavior that will ultimately cost us more than if we can just accept the truth. Influences: Buckaroo Bonzai, Windows, and A…

Sometimes, we need to step outside of ourselves. Inspiration seems to prefer to find us instead of us finding inspiration. Our ability to think is an incredible gift, yet it also has the ability to keep us in endless negative loops. Learning to not think is key to learning to think better. Influences: Eckhart Tolle, Long Walks, and Nature Website: …

There is no escaping time yet we allow ourselves to worry over it anyways. Mortality, youth, old age, wasted time, milestones, funerals, and ghosts! Why do we let ourselves worry so much over getting old? Influences: Flowers, My Birthday, and Athletes Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.com…

We need to let ourselves rely on others sometimes. Our successes in life depend on so many more people than ourselves. No one is as independent as they think. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Influences: Alone (TV Series), Vulnerability, Jordan Peterson, and Friendship Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr.com…

The more we know about the past the easier it is to understand the present. The way we see the world is as if we were looking through a dirty window that represents the culture and time we live in. Getting to read primary source literature from a different time period is an opportunity to see the world through someone else’s window. Influences: Pol…

Figuring out who we are is a process of trying on different versions of ourselves. We go through life trying to figure out who we are by trying on versions of ourselves. Sometimes those identities we adopt don’t end up fitting very well, so we can benefit from an openness to shed what isn’t going to get us where we want to be. Influences: Pirates o…

Good things are often preceded by bad things. An even greater tragedy than having bad things happen to us would be to never have bad things happen to us. If there is nothing for us to overcome in life, then arguably we are not that different from a rock. We would just exist… with no passion and no purpose. Influences: Les Misérables, Brandon Mull, …

What would you do differently today if your body was inhabited by the spirit of your hero? How would we approach our life differently if Superman inhabited our body or some other hero? Are there things we would stop doing or things we would start doing? Influences: Superman, The Lord of the Rings, WWJD, Pop Music, and the Reformation Website: skipp…

Are people so simple that they can truly be summed up in one word? When we are mad at a person, it is hard to see anything other than their worst qualities, but nobody is just one set of behaviors. Being able to see a person as more than just one set of traits can set you free from the toll of hatred and naivete. Influences: Star Wars, College, and…

A lesson about giving. The things in our lives are less important than we may think. Learning to give things up for the sake of others is a path to a higher level of joy. If we can learn to be happy without the stuff in our life, we have freed ourselves from chains we didn’t even know were there. Influences: The Philippines, MP3 Players, Little Chi…

What questions will get us more bang for our buck when we are frustrated? When we struggle with a problem, sometimes we need to ask better questions. Often, why questions are asked more as a futile petition to the universe than a sincere attempt to seek further knowledge. How questions help us to stay in a more technical mindset that sets our mind …

How can we manage our internal conflicts? There seem to be two forces inside of us, one emotional and the other logical. What do we do when our emotions tell us one thing and our logical mind tells us another, and how can we reconcile the two? Influences: Lawsuits, My Daughter, and Children Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: info@skippingstonessr…

Do you hate the version of you that did things you're embarrased by? Most of us will not tolerate it when someone else is berating us, yet we give the inner critic in our own minds a free pass. It is hard to move past mistakes when we will not forgive ourselves and move on from it. Influences: Childhood Photographs, The Inner Critic, and My Son Web…

What would it take for you to willingly fight in a battle you expected to die in? If you were a soldier being told to fight a battle you knew you would lose, what would you have to hear in order to have a willingness to walk to your death anyways. Influences: Napoleon, Veterans, Russia, Dragons, and Spartans Website: skippingstonessr.com Email: inf…

Let's assume you have had your fill of luxury. What next? If you had all the money and the time in the world, how would you use it? Are we waiting until we have all the time and the money before we consider what is truly meaningful to us, and if we already know what is meaningful to us, is there anything we could be doing now? Influences: Video Gam…

Do you have something you like so much that it compels you to it? If not, it may be within reach. Are the distractions in your life keeping you from finding out what you actually like? You need to do things in order to find things that you like. Eventually, those things you like can become the tools whereby you can forward a purpose. Influences: Ne…

Sometimes following a passion means doing things that are not our passion for a while. Sometimes, we need to give up what we are passionate about in order to pursue our passion at a later point in time. A starving man will be too distracted to focus on his passions until he has had a chance to eat. Influences: Retirement, My Mother, Corporate Ameri…

How much of what we think is fed to us by only a few people? We may not be living in a computer program, but the world we interact with has been largely curated for us. How can we live outside of the algorithms that have been made to influence us? We are given to think there are only ever one or two ways to think about things when there are an infi…

Why do we make such efforts to see the other side of the world when we barely know the side we reside in? Too many of us will spend our life savings going to some obscure place on the other side of the world before we have even gotten to know the place we live. Travel is often just a novelty that people dress up as a life-altering experience to jus…

Sometimes we force oursleves to keep certain beliefs. There is a better way. Sometimes we come at our beliefs from a place of obligation or fear. What if what we believed could be motivated by what we love? Few things in the Universe we inhabit are actually known to us, which means it is up to us to decide what we think is true. Truth is not always…

We don't need to trap ourselves into the way we describe ourselves to others. It is easy to define ourselves and others by the things we like to do or even just the things we do for work. Sometimes these externally given as well as self-given labels can be confining for us because nobody can really be defined by something as simple as what they do …

Hard times are often an opportunity if we choose to embrace them. When your world is falling apart you may be unhappy, but that crisis can be an opportunity for you to prioritize what actually matters to you. Anything we have attained in life is something we didn’t have at some point in time. As painful as loss can be, we can turn it into wisdom an…

What menu did life hand you and should you be asking for another? Sometimes when you are told to choose between A and B, the right answer is actually C. We don’t need to be fooled into thinking that our options in life are so limited. Influences: Chinese Restaurants, Prisons, Homeless People, and News Organizations Website: skippingstonessr.com Ema…

Welcome to Skipping Stones, a podcast by Seth Roberts.Von Seth Roberts