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I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.

"It's a different sort of place," the billionaire says.

Listen now (12 min) | This week’s podcast (12 minutes) is on a crucial difference, between planning to start, and planning to finish. We talk a lot about the difference between more and less planning, on the spectrum between full waterfall and full agile, and like most of you, I share a bias towards less planning.

I create the equivalent of at least 1 book worth of writing per week. Most of my work ends up in newsletters, websites, and marketing campaigns for companies you know very well. You won’t see my name, but you’re probably reading my stuff all the time. On good days, I get to write for you directly.

Dieter Rams’ profound influences on modern design blossomed throughout his 30+ years working for Braun and in his text, “10 Principles for Good Design.”

A system to organise projects.

Follow a system. There are plenty out there. Find one, and give it a chance. Never, ever forget there are three parts to the system: nutrition, resistance (weights) and CV. All need to be addressed. But within that there are...

In my last article I provided an overview of the six major models of Product Ops that I have encountered (thus far), and I shared my views on each.  But while I highlighted the models that I consider dangerous or harmful, I didn’t elaborate on the root cause of the harmful models. In this article […]

A great gift you can give the children in your life.

The reason behind @jack’s post-Twitter tweet rampage.

I have become very fond of iOS widgets both on my iPad and iPhone. On the iPad, it functions as a dashboard into all my important apps and…

Plus his devotion to daily routines, meditation, Bob’s Big Boy, and sugar!!!

PLUS: My favorite book, TV show, podcast, movie and meme.

If you can master the art of the start, then any creative endeavor is possible.

In a culture so focused on managing time, we have become subservient to it.

Less than 4% of the estimated 50 million creators earn a living from their creations. While that might not seem fair, it couldn't be any other way.

In settings where sorting is difficult, half a bushel of perfect apples is worth more than a full bushel with a rotten apple in it. One bad apple can spoil a whole bunch. We pay a significant premi…

Young People Are Leading the Mental Health Revolution

By Emma Young. But timing matters: students only benefited if the second viewing was immediately before a test.

Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...

A lot of things don’t make any sense. The numbers don’t add up, the explanations are full of holes. And yet they keep happening – people making crazy decisions, reacting in bizarre ways. Over and over. Historian Will Durant once said, “logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways. A common cause of everything from divisive arguments to bad forecasting is that it can be hard to distinguish what’s happening from what you think should be happening. Two short war stories to show you what I mean. The Battle of the Bulge was one of the deadliest American military battles in history. Nineteen thousand American soldiers were killed, another 70,000 missing or wounded, in just over a month as Nazi Germany made an ill-fated last push against the Allies. Part of the reason it was so bloody is that Americans were surprised. And part of the reason they were surprised is that in the rational minds of American generals, it made no sense for Germany to attack. The Germans didn’t have enough troops to win a counterattack, and the few that were left were often children under age 18 with no combat experience. They didn’t have enough fuel. They were running out of food. The terrain of the Ardenne Forest in Belgium stacked the odds against them. The weather was atrocious. The Allies knew all of this. They reasoned that any rational German commander would not launch a counterattack. So the American lines were left fairly thin and ill-supplied. And then, boom. The Germans attacked anyway. What the American generals overlooked was how unhinged Hitler had become. He wasn’t rational. He was living in his own world, detached from reality and reason. When his generals asked where they should get fuel to complete the attack, Hitler said they could just steal it from the Americans. Reality didn’t matter. Historian Stephen Ambrose notes that Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley got all the war-planning reasoning and logic right in late 1944, except for one detail – how irrational Hitler had become. But that mattered more than anything. A generation later, something similar happened during the Vietnam war. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara viewed the world as a big math problem. He wanted everything quantified, and based his career on the idea that any problem could be solved if you obeyed the cold truth of statistics and logic. One of the key measures of success during Vietnam was body count – how many Viet Cong did American troops kill? Are more Viet Cong dying than Americans? It was easy to track, easy to show on a chart, and became an obsession. Then there was the logic: If enough Northern Vietnamese were killed, you could break the spirit of the enemy who saw their chances of victory diminished. More enemy bodies was equated with being closer to winning. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces, explained in 1967: We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations. Then they will have to reassess their position. The war was turned into a math equation. If enemy dead outnumbered American dead, Americans would win. Ice-cold logic. But the bodies piled up, and the war went on. And on. And on. The “equation” would work only if the North Vietnamese leaders were calm, rational actors who would “calculate costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and make choices accordingly,” as one paper put it. But they weren’t. Edward Lansdale of the CIA once told McNamara that his statistics were missing something. McNamara said, “What?” Landsdale said, “The feelings of the Vietnamese people.” You couldn’t capture that on a chart. But it meant everything. In 1966 New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote: I seldom talked to any North Vietnamese without some reference coming into the conversation of the people’s preparedness to fight ten, fifteen, even twenty years in order to achieve victory. At first I thought such expressions might reflect government propaganda … but … I began to realize that this was a national psychology. Ho Chi Minh put it more bluntly: “You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, but it is you who will tire first.” That’s exactly how it played out in America, where statistics meant nothing against feelings. Westmoreland once told Senator Fritz Hollings, “We’re killing these people at a rate of 10 to one.” Hollings replied, “The American people don’t care about the 10. They care about the one.” That was hard to reconcile in the statistical mind of someone like McNamara. It was like defying the laws of physics, or a typo in a math equation. But that’s how the world works. Some things just don’t compute. Investor Jim Grant once said: To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed. That’s always been the case. And it will always be the case. One way to think about this is that there are always two sides to every investment: The number and the story. Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow. The numbers are easy to measure, easy to track, easy to formulate. They’re getting easier as almost everyone has cheap access to information. But the stories are often bizarre reflections of people’s hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, and tribal affiliations. And they’re getting more bizarre as social media amplifies the most emotionally appealing views. A few recent examples of how powerful this can be: Lehman Brothers was in great shape on September 10th, 2008. Its Tier 1 capital ratio – a measure of a bank’s ability to endure loss – was 11.7%. That was higher than the previous quarter. Higher than Goldman Sachs. Higher than Bank of America. It was more capital than Lehman had in 2007, when the banking industry was about as strong as it had ever been. Seventy-two hours later it was bankrupt. The only thing that changed during those three days was investors’ faith in the company. One day they believed in the company. The next they didn’t and stopped buying the debt that funded Lehman’s balance sheet. That faith is the only thing that mattered. But it was the one thing that was hard to quantify, hard to model, hard to predict, and didn’t compute in a traditional valuation model. GameStop was the opposite. The statistics showed it was on the edge of bankruptcy in 2020. Then it became a cultural obsession on reddit, the stock surged, the company raised a ton of money, and now it’s worth $11 billion. Same thing here: The most important variable was the stories people told and the emotions they suddenly stumbled upon. And that was the only thing you couldn’t measure and couldn’t predict with foresight. That’s why the results don’t compute. Whenever something like this happens you see people shocked and angry about how the market has become detached from fundamentals. But Grant was right: It’s always been like this. The 1920s were giddy. The ‘30s were pure panic. The world was coming to an end in the ‘40s. The fifties, ‘60s, ‘70s, were boom to bust, over and over. The ‘80s and ‘90s were insane. The 2000s have been like a reality TV show. If you’ve relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy you’ve been confused for 100 years straight. Japan is offering companies a 40% tax rebate to raise wages. But most companies aren’t, in part because raises just aren’t part of the Japanese business culture. Meanwhile, JPEGs of apes have risen in value several thousand percent in the last few months, in part because that is part of the crypto culture. Economist Per Bylund tweeted this recently: The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any), and its value is higher the more it’s wanted and the less there is of it. Not utility, not discounted cash flow – just whether people want it or not, for any reason. So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. To me it’s obvious that the one thing you can’t measure, can’t predict, and can’t model in a spreadsheet is the most powerful force in all of business and investing – just like it’s the most powerful force in the military. Same in politics. Same in careers. Same in relationships. A lot of things don’t compute. The danger, and you see it often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like – so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking, “Why is this happening?” and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened. The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a neverending chain of absurdity, confusions, messy relationships, and imperfect people. Making sense of that world requires admitting a few things. John Nash is one of the smartest mathematicians to ever live, winning the Nobel Prize. He was also schizophrenic, and spent most of his life convinced that aliens were sending him coded messages. In her book A Beautiful Mind, Silvia Nasar recounts a conversation between Nash and Harvard professor George Mackey: “How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof, how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the wo

A new economic model is emerging. Here's why it makes sense.

The author of "The Black Swan" and "Skin in the Game" on what it's like to have true financial freedom.