What happens when you are struggling, when things are tense and difficult, when you know that your life at a given moment isn’t quite working? People have different strategies.

Some of us look inward and try to find a way forward from there. Some of us instead lift up our heads, look at what’s around, and try to figure out what’s wrong—and then possibly come to a different understanding of the problem and a different way of approaching it. Still others also look outward, but only for something or someone to blame.

And then there’s the double-down: You work twice as hard at whatever you’re doing and don’t ever look up. Which means that you’re likely to miss the need for a course correction, and will fail to see that the landscape has changed.

We used to joke about the importance of “working harder, working faster.” That’s the essence of doubling down. You keep accelerating along a path that isn’t quite right and certainly doesn’t feel that way. You can’t figure out what exactly is wrong—that is, what’s off about your career or your life as a whole. But you figure that everything gets better if you simply work harder, so why not do just that?

There’s a lot of doubling down going on right now. In every area, people are continuing to work harder in the exact same way that they’ve always been working. And all the while, they believe that somehow they will be able to pull out of the spiral with…some more hard work. They continue to block out the nagging feeling that it doesn’t feel right. (It feels, in fact, like digging a hole.)

We double down in every aspect of our lives. It’s funny how, these days, it’s hard even to take a walk without needing to have a conversation as well—usually, by cellphone. When in double-down mode, we don’t allow ourselves to be in one moment at a time, to actually be when and where we are. Putting yourself with the person you are talking to instead being right there, seeing what you can draw from.

It’s kind of the antithesis of meditation. And as we practice this anti-meditative state of being, we keep running, keep doubling down, keep feeling like we’re unproductively racing around, not going anywhere.

So what I’m pledging to do here is stop doubling down. Instead, I am going to slow down and see what’s around me. See who, what, and where makes sense, and why. I’m going to slow down for all of that.

I’m going to stop trying to be in two places at one time.

What about you?

Housework may seem like the ultimate romance-killer. But guess what?

“A new study shows that for husbands and wives alike, the more housework you do, the more often you are likely to have sex with your spouse.”

So begins an entertaining and illuminating piece by Sue Shellenbarger in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Housework Pays Off Between the Sheets.”

Earlier studies have hinted at this connection for men; the sight of a husband mopping the floor or doing dishes sparks affection in the hearts of many wives. But the more-housework-equals-more-sex link for wives, documented in a study of 6,877 married couples published online recently in the Journal of Family Issues, is a surprise.

“Scrubbing the floor is no aphrodisiac, and seeing your spouse doing it usually isn’t either. ‘My husband loves doing laundry, yet I don’t get any thrill out of his doing it,’ says Chicago writer Julie Danis. ‘And I don’t think he thinks it’s sexy when I go around gathering the detritus of his daily life.’”

Read the rest of the article here.

David Brooks’s recent column “Where the Wild Things Are” in the NYT is an excellent exploration of philosophical vs. psychological views of our character and emotions.

This plays into all of the thinking we are doing around failure for Icarus Talks. Looking for those nails I am with my fail strength hammer.

There is a tipping point for connectors. When people know you are a connector—truly in the fiber of your being—they  want to connect to you, and they want you to connect them to the people they should know. If you do it for love rather than for money, people really want to be on your side.

How do I do it?

It’s not that I do it, it’s that I cannot not do it. Every time I think of the people I know, I think of who they should know to get what they need to get done, faster, better, smarter. It seems inconceivable that they should not know each other. I would dismiss this craving as the adult version of wanting all of your friends to like one another, but I know that it is way more powerful than that. I have seen the right people coming together at the right time create extraordinary value, solve problems, and heal real or metaphorical pain.

Sometimes it takes a conversation with a total stranger to knock sense into you. That’s what happened Thursday afternoon. Mutual friend Scott Kurnit did the honors of an email introducing me to Shelly Palmer. We did what all good professionals today do. Set up a time to connect by phone.

It took only a few minutes to know we had lots in common, between our parallel careers in media and technologies, similar sensibilities, points of view, and some idea of a course taken in these uncharted waters. The moment of truth came when he said to me, “Sunny, you talk in all the right ways, and are a part of this world, and yet I go to your site and find a splash page and an abandoned WordPress blog. Either turn it off or spend enough time each day practicing what you preach.”

He is right, so finally, I am getting started.

I’m not sure how I feel about living life out loud…but I know I am prepared to live at least part of my professional life out loud. But then that gets interesting when the boundaries between your professional and personal lives blur.

I think about boundaries all the time these days. I think about how difficult it is to live our boundaries. About how much we crave authenticity and honesty, and yet how hard it is to really be consistent. How easily we are disappointed by ourselves and those closest to us, to say nothing of our institutions and our government.

So, Shelly, this one’s for you. And thank you for striking the match.