A surprising discovery by Bill Wilson, the founder of AA. — How to break free from addiction for good? Whether it’s alcohol or social media, if you have battled with addiction for any number of years, you know that it’s not enough to just stop. Stopping is relatively easy. The hard part is not to start again. Bill Wilson, a co-founder…

Some people feel bored when life goes well. — A lot of stress is self-inflicted. That is, we can avoid it if we choose to. But we choose not to. The reason is that our bodies “need” it. Often people don’t want to reduce stress because they use it as compensation for their nutritional deficiencies. According to Dr. James…

Insight from an egret. — How to be enough with who I am? Here’s the secret of an egret. I was walking along the creek, feeling empty. I didn’t even know why. There was this unsettling feeling that something was amiss. I know this feeling so well. It haunts me. It always tells me the…

From an English to Russian translator. — I started translating a new book for one of my old clients today (Russian into English). So I thought I would jot down some thoughts and insights on the process of translating a book from a co-creator’s standpoint. Translating a book is an act of co-creation, not a mechanical process How do you translate a book? I start with the mindset. Having…

“Knowledge puffs up and love builds up.” (St. Paul) — How to win an argument by losing it? Here’s my take on it. My teenage daughter has different political views. I didn’t quite notice how and where she got them. But the more we tried to “talk her out of it,” “show her how things really are,” “open her eyes,”…

How to break the addiction to negative thinking — I was in bed, dozing off. She wanted to tell me all the COVID news she had heard that day. Her eyes were full of news. She needed to vent. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear all that — I knew I would lose the precious half an hour…

How emptying your mind helps your creativity. — “The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction.” Meister Eckhart I was looking at the lampshade that I was designing as part of my business. I liked the way it turned out. And yet, something made me doubt whether it was ready to go to the client. …

How to use machine translation and not be used by it. — As a translator since 1993 and a certified machine translation post-editor, I have worked with several machine translation engines over the past few years, and I see that MT has a bright and a dark side — depending on how you approach it. So what is the future of machine…