A – Z · The lexicon

The self-development glossary.

Plain-English definitions of the ideas we cite most — no jargon, no fluff, no gurus. Fifty terms across fourteen desks.

Defined terms

Letters covered

Desks referenced

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Anchor Habit: A single foundational habit whose presence pulls other habits into place.
Anti-Goal: Explicitly naming outcomes you do not want, to steer decisions by what you'll refuse.
Atomic Habit: A tiny routine so small it feels almost embarrassing to skip — the smallest unit of behavior change.
Attachment Style: Recurring pattern in how you seek closeness or distance in relationships — secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized.
Behavioral Activation: Depression-fighting technique of scheduling small, valued actions instead of waiting to feel like it.
Bikeshedding: Spending disproportionate time on trivial details while ignoring the important decision at hand.
Cognitive Reframing: Deliberately changing the meaning you assign to a situation to change how you respond to it.
Compound Interest of Behavior: Small daily improvements accumulate into radically different long-term outcomes.
Decision Journal: A written log of important choices — the reasoning, the stakes and the expected outcome — reviewed later.
Deep Work: Focused, undistracted cognitive effort on a demanding task, coined by Cal Newport.
Digital Sabbath: A recurring day or evening without screens, chosen for restoration rather than avoidance.
Divergent Thinking: Generating many possible solutions to a problem — the raw material of creativity.
Eisenhower Matrix: Sorting tasks by urgent/important to decide what to do, schedule, delegate or delete.
Emotional Labor: The invisible work of managing feelings — yours and others' — inside a relationship or role.
Financial Runway: The number of months you can survive at your current spend if income stops.
FIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early — a movement built on high savings and lean living.
First Principles: Reasoning up from basic truths instead of by analogy — popularised in business by Elon Musk, in physics by Feynman.
Flow State: The state of full absorption in an activity that matches skill to challenge, coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Growth Mindset: Belief that abilities can be developed through effort, coined by Carol Dweck.
Habit Stacking: Attaching a new habit to an existing one to inherit the trigger — 'after X, I will Y'.
Ikigai: Japanese concept of the reason for being — the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what pays.
Implementation Intention: A specific plan of the form 'When situation X arises, I will perform response Y' — repeatedly shown to boost follow-through.
Kaizen: Japanese principle of continuous improvement through many small changes rather than a few large ones.
Lifestyle Design: Deliberately architecting your days — location, schedule, income — around the life you want.
Locus of Control: The degree to which you believe you influence outcomes in your life vs. external forces.
Loss Aversion: The tendency to feel losses about twice as strongly as equivalent gains.
Minimum Viable Day: The smallest version of your ideal day you can execute even on your worst days.
Non-Sleep Deep Rest: A short guided practice of body-scan and slow breathing that mimics some restorative effects of sleep.
Opportunity Cost: The value of the next-best option you gave up when you chose the one you did.
Personal Brand: The public perception of your professional identity, shaped deliberately over time.
Pomodoro: A time-boxing technique using 25-minute focus intervals separated by 5-minute breaks.
Positive Discipline: A parenting approach that is firm and kind — teaching skills instead of punishing.
Product-Market Fit: The moment your product finally satisfies a strong market demand.
Radical Candor: Feedback that combines caring personally with challenging directly, coined by Kim Scott.
Retrospective: A structured look back at a period of work to name what to keep, drop and change.
Sabbatical: An intentional pause from work — a month, quarter or year — used for rest, learning or reinvention.
Self-Efficacy: Your belief in your ability to execute the actions needed to reach a goal, coined by Albert Bandura.
Sensemaking: The active process of turning ambiguous experience into an ordered story you can act on.
Servant Leadership: A leadership philosophy where the primary role is to serve the team, coined by Robert Greenleaf.
Shadow Work: Examining the disowned parts of yourself to reduce their unconscious grip on your behavior.
Sisu: Finnish concept of quiet, unrelenting perseverance in the face of hardship.
Sleep Hygiene: The set of behaviors that make consistent, restorative sleep more likely.
Slow Productivity: A model of professional excellence built on fewer commitments, natural pace and obsessive quality.
SMART Goals: Goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Spaced Repetition: A learning method that schedules reviews at expanding intervals to move knowledge into long-term memory.
Stoicism: Ancient philosophy of virtue and equanimity focused on what you can control.
Time Blocking: Assigning specific hours to specific work in advance instead of reacting to a to-do list.
Values Elicitation: The exercise of naming your core values explicitly so future decisions get easier.
Vision Statement: A short written picture of the life or company you're trying to build over the next 3–10 years.
Wheel of Life: A coaching diagram that rates satisfaction across life domains to reveal where to focus next.
Zero-Based Calendar: Rebuilding your week from an empty calendar every Sunday instead of inheriting last week's commitments.
Zone of Genius: The work only you can do at world-class level — the intersection of skill, passion and impact.