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At most companies, people put together a deck, reserve a room (physical or virtual), and call a meeting to pitch a new idea. If they're lucky, no one interrupts them while they're presenting. When it's over, people react. This is precisely the problem. The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy in...

Writing about something teaches you about what you know, what you don’t know, and how to think.

I realize how it sounds, but I'm going to say it anyway because it's the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here's how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch F

Here’s the secret, if you can bear it

Neil Gaiman gave this keynote at the thirty-fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in Orlando, Florida, in 2013.

Let's do more of those

You can’t give general advice. If I do, millions of creators are going to see this and then they’re going to do it and I’m going to fuck them over.

Ideas to help you make sense of the world

Never let a bad market go to waste

The best finance blog you've never heard of. 10/10 stories, 5/10 art. Check it out 👇🏼

The key to becoming anti-fragile financially is Multiple Income Streams. If you lose one income stream, there are others to make up for it. Most people have 1 (or, in corporate America, a weak 1+2 punch). This leaves a ton of exposure to your cash flow/income statement, as all of your eggs are in on

What we saw happen in the UK last week is the first shock, not the last, and all the massive pension funds and asset owners who have turned themselves into shadow hedge funds, full of swaps and leverage through the sweet whispers of Wall Street Wormtongue, will be our undoing. Read more

I know, these are weird and trying times. It all makes you wonder what the point of stock-picking is. What is the purpose of kicking the tires, looking under the hood, and doing our jobs?

Not everything can be explained by numbers. In recent times, two eminent academics, one a Nobel laureate – Robert Shiller and the other Aswath Damodaran, both known for their works based on extensive quantitative methods, have published books about the importance of stories in understanding economics and business alike – Shiller’s Narrative Economics and Damodaran’s Narratives and Numbers. […]

Creator spotlight: StrawberryMilkMob

There's a lot of talk right now about smaller, slimmer, tighter teams. Economics are forcing companies to cut back, and what they're finding is progress. Trim the overgrown crown, let the sunshine meet the ground, and all sorts of new life blooms on the forest floor. Even Zuck, master of a megacorp, is noticing it: https://twitter.com/...

I preach about the miracle of constraints and their ability to boost creativity in anyone. But I see un-useful constraints being used all the time by creators, so I wanted to make a small list of examples to clarify what a useful constraint looks like. There’s only two real

Another obsession. Do you read to signal or to learn?

“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett

Why keep it to 30

Some percentage of you are your own boss, or work from home, or otherwise have a dangerous level of flexibility around when you actually get to work. Some of you also know you're especially prone to procrastination, even on a good day. If you’re both of these things, you know how deadly the combination can be. Severe procrastination isn’t just

A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept - slope_vs_starting.md

A simple exercise

Well, you can’t. Right? That’s the received wisdom. You have to post on social media to direct people to your blog because nobody has RSS feeds any more, nobody curates what we used to grudgingly c…

“Curation” shouldn’t be a dirty word, but it is. In the last decade, it has come to mean slapped-together-links, or outright-stolen content, used to fill space and capture just enough attention to convert free onlookers into consumers. There’s a lot of truth behind that association. In fact, I’