What do you want to accomplish?

On Monday night, Ohio State and Notre Dame played for the college football national championship in Atlanta. Each team earned their way to the title game by winning three playoff games in the first 12-team playoff at the FBS level of college football.

The dark cloud of pessimism wants to convince you that you are stuck in a relentless storm where outcomes are predetermined, and effort is pointless. Pessimism lets emotion masquerade as logic.

I found myself thinking about destiny last week. Not my own destiny but destiny itself. Is destiny real and worth paying attention to? It is real and deserves your attention, but people misinterpret what it is and how it works.

It’s not the experience of conflict that shapes your life but how you resolve it. Not all conflict is created equal, though. Some matter more than others. Here are four camouflaged conflicts that shape your life.

Life is resolving conflict. Not avoiding it. Not hiding from it. Not eliminating it. Resolving it.

We rarely recognize how often we want something to be true, and we realize even less how much that desire—wanting a certain thing to be true—affects our attitudes, opinions, and emotions.

You do not need a reason to chase pleasure and avoid pain. It's biologically natural, involuntary, and self-justifying. You moved away from pain and toward pleasure before you could think.

Discipline takes work. That is not a secret. It not only takes work to get better — it takes work to be disciplined at all.

Each moment is an opportunity. An opportunity to engage and experience, progress and learn, create and contribute, share and receive.