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A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing that creates an interconnected web of thought. Its emphasis is on connection and not mere collection of ideas.

All too often disagreements spiral into conflict. Prevent that happening by signalling your receptiveness with these words

​ ​ ​ The life-changing magic of not tidying up I store all my ideas for writing, plus my reading notes and any interesting quotations I encounter, in an app called Ulysses. (I ...

We’re afraid. We know what we want to do, what we could do, what we should do.  It’s an idea for a new business. It’s dropping out of college. It’s telling someone how we feel. It’s trying something radically different.  But something gets in the way. The voice in our head. The voice of others inside our head. People tell us that our idea is crazy, that the odds are slim, that people like us do things like this, not like that.  Oh, what this costs us. “Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion,” Florence Nightingale, a woman who resisted her calling for a good chunk of the first thirty years of her life, once wrote. Yet these pedestrian but powerful fears—they keep so many of us from our destiny. They give us a million reasons why. Or why not.  But it must be said that greatness is impossible without taking the risk, without leaping into uncertainty, without overcoming fear. Name one good thing that did not require at least a few hard seconds of bravery. If we wish to be great, if we wish to realize our potential, we must learn how to conquer fear, or at least rise above it in the moments that matter. So here, adapted from my just-released book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, are 15 ways to do just that…and to hopefully get a little closer to reaching your potential.  Defeat Fear With Logic In sobriety circles they use the acronym F.E.A.R. “False Evidence Appearing Real.” That’s what fear is. False impressions that feel real. We must break fear down logically. Go to the root of it. Explain it. Tell yourself: It’s just money. It’s just a bad article. It’s just a meeting with people yelling at one another. Is that something you need to be afraid of? “There are more things,” Seneca wrote, “likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” Break it down. Really look at the facts. Investigate. Only then can we really see. Block Out Other People’s Opinions  Almost everything new, everything impressive, everything right, was done over the loud objections of the status quo. Most of what is beloved now was looked down on at the time of its creation or adoption by people who now pretend that never happened. When I talked to the rapper Logic on the Daily Stoic podcast, he talked about how every time he puts out a new album, the haters come out in droves. When he put out his first album, they wanted the sound and style of his mixtapes. When he put out his second album, they wanted the sound and style of his first album. When he put out his third album, they wanted the sound and style of his second album. And on and on. This is how it goes. This is how it has always gone. Some two thousand years, Cicero wrote about the haters, the gossipers, the side-line commentators. “Let other people worry over what they will say about you,” he said. “They will say it in any case.” Don’t value the opinion of faceless, unaccountable strangers above your own considered judgment. Question Your Extrapolations In Courage is Calling, I tell the story of Ulysses S. Grant early in his military career on a long journey across East Texas. It was just him and one other man crossing creeks and rivers in hostile territory filled with thick scrub bush and rattlesnakes and “the most unearthly howling of wolves.” Grant wanted to turn back and prayed that his companion would suggest it. The other officer, a little more weathered and experienced than Grant, smiled and pushed on. “Grant, how many wolves do you think are in that pack?” he asked. Not wanting to seem stupid or a coward, Grant tried to casually underestimate the threat that terrified him. “Oh, about twenty,” he said with nonchalance that betrayed his racing heart. Suddenly, Grant and the officer came upon the source of the sound. There, resting comfortably, with mischievous confidence, were just two wolves. So unnerved by a danger with which he was unfamiliar, it had never occurred to him to question the racing of his heart or the extrapolations of his mind. The night is dark and full of terrors. We face many enemies in life. But you have to understand: They are not nearly as formi- dable as your mind makes you think. Define Your Fears What we fear, we do not exactly know. We never actually define what so worries us. Our fears are not concrete, they are shadows, illusions, refractions. The entrepreneur and writer Tim Ferriss has spoken of the exercise of “fear setting”—of defining and articulating the nightmares, anxieties, and doubts that hold us back. Indeed, the ancient roots of this practice go back at least to the Stoics. Seneca wrote about premeditatio malorum, the deliberate meditation on the evils that we might encounter. Vague fear is sufficient to deter us; the more it is explored, the less power it has over us. Focus On The Other Side Of Fear Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them. Our bruises and scars become armor. Our struggles become experience. They make us better. They prepared us for this moment, just as this moment will prepare us for one that lies ahead. They are the flavoring that makes victory taste so sweet. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If everyone did it, how valuable would it be? The whole point is that it’s hard. The risk is a feature, not a bug. Nec aspera terrent. Don’t be frightened by difficulties. Be like the athlete, knowing what a hard workout gives you: stronger muscles. Find Your Agency Fear determines what is or isn’t [...]

Ben Holliday -

Cal Newport argues in his book Deep Work that this skill is increasingly rare and valuable. Those who master it will thrive. I've been trying to practice…

Yesterday I had lunch with a former Ph.D student of mine, who is now highly successful and tenured at a very good school.  I was reminded that, over twenty years ago, I was Graduate Director of Admissions.  One of my favorite strategies was to take strong candidates who applied for Masters and also offer them […]

Stepping away from social media, your desk, or your own noisy brain, can lead to unexpected connections and creative explorations.

Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me. — Dave Barry

A simple formula to get clarity on your goal and express it in a sentence.

Salesy. Insincere. Shallow. Most blog posts stink of "marketing," and these four mistakes are usually to blame.

Rudyard Kipling's timeless poem "If" told through the stories of cultural icons.

Most approaches to time management make things worse. Start by acknowledging your limits

In my attempts to make "smart notes", I have a long trail of missteps and blunders. Here's my attempt to learn from them and document what I've learned along the way.

The most important piece of furniture in the house.

​ ​ ​ My book Four Thousand Weeks, about embracing your limits and finally getting round to what counts, is out now, and is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller! In my u...

Obsidian is great at a lot of things, but quick-capturing text is not one of them. I prefer to quick-capture my text in Drafts and then send it to Obsidian using Drafts Actions.

The rules we follow to "make it" as an artist are made by commercial interests that don't align with ours. And now, it's time for us to take action.

Robert Townsend, chief executive of Avis, knew his 1962 ad campaign was going to be a big risk. Avis turned a $3.2m loss into a $1.2m profit.

How Twitter got its first 1000 users

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The outline method is one of the most common, but still one of the best note-taking methods. It reduces editing and reviewing time of your notes. We explain how it works and discuss it’s pros & cons.

Thread by @G_S_Bhogal: My peoples, the time has come for a MEGATHREAD. In 40 tweets I will explain another 40 concepts you should know. Strap in. Here we go: Abstraction: There are scales of explanation. A human...…

Bayes' theorem is heavily used in machine learning, AI, statistics, and other areas. But it's also a useful tool to lead a more rational life.

The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t. The technologies, trends, tragedies and winners – the events that take place – are always in flux and can be nearly impossible to predict. But the behaviors that drive people into action, influence their thoughts and guide their beliefs, are stable. They’re the same today as they were 100 years ago and will be 100 years from now. Markets change, but greed and fear never do. Industries change, but ambition and complacency don’t. Laws change, but the tribal instincts of politics don’t. My deepest forecasting belief is that you can better understand the future if you focus on the behaviors that never change instead of the events that might. And those behaviors have a common denominator: They follow the path of least resistance of people trying to simplify a complex world into a few stories that make sense and make them feel good about themselves. Simple stories, feel-good stories. Those are some of history’s most seductive beliefs, and they always will be. A few that stick out: 1. An illusion that other people’s bad circumstances couldn’t also happen to you. Most of history is slow progress amid constant bad news and occasional terrible news. A seductive story when hearing about tragedy is to believe this awful thing happened to this person, company, or nation, but it almost certainly couldn’t happen to me. And you may be right about that. Your country may be more stable than the one that collapsed, your business may be stronger than the one that went bankrupt, and your health may be better than the person diagnosed with cancer. The problem is that people don’t like to think in probabilities; it’s so much easier to think about risk as black or white, it will happen or it won’t. So rather than thinking your business has a 10% chance of failure, it’s easier to think that what happened to Sears and Lehman Brothers could never happen to you. Before 2008 you didn’t think there’s a 5% chance of a banking collapse in America; you just looked at what had been happening in Latin America for decades and thought, “that can’t happen here.” Most of the world didn’t look at Wuhan China last February and think, “there’s a 25% chance that this is our future.” You thought, “I can’t even imagine my town being on lockdown.” Couldn’t even fathom it happening here. That was easier to understand and made you feel better. When you go through life thinking low-probability events are zero-probability events, you’re bound to get stuck in an illusion that what happened to someone else couldn’t also happen to you. That’s especially true when you add up the low odds of lots of unfortunate events. If next year there’s a 1% chance of a new disastrous pandemic, a 1% chance of a crippling depression, a 1% chance of a catastrophic flood, a 1% chance of political collapse, and on and on, then the odds that something bad will happen next year – or any year – are … pretty good. “History is just one damn thing after another” the saying goes. A few years ago I interviewed Yale economist Robert Shiller. He talked about the possibility – not quite a forecast – that home prices could decline adjusted for inflation for a decade or longer. I asked him why he thought that, or how it could happen. “Well, it happened before,” he said. Real home prices fell for most of the 20th century. “So of course it could happen again,” even if it seems crazy. 2. Imagining an unrealistic world where progress and success don’t demand a fee, and a belief that hassle, nonsense, disagreement and uncertainty are bugs rather than a cost of admission to getting ahead. Jeff Bezos recently talked about the realities of loving your job: If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that. Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That’s reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don’t like. You can be a Supreme Court Justice and there’s still going to be pieces of your job you don’t like. You can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee meetings. Every job comes with pieces you don’t like. And we need to say: That’s part of it. That’s part of it. It’s part of everything. His advice applies to so much more than careers. A simple rule that’s obvious but easy to ignore is that nothing worth pursuing is free. How could it be otherwise? Everything has a price, and the price is usually proportionate to the potential rewards. But the price is rarely on a price tag. You don’t pay it with cash. Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, doubt, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, and general bullshit. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead. A lot of times that price is worth paying. But you have to realize it’s a price that must be paid. There are few coupons and sales are rare. A seductive belief throughout history is people expecting an idealized world where you demand perfection and assume that having little tolerance for error, variability, and disagreement is an asset. It’s a simple story, and it feels good. I wish it were true. But it’s so at odds with reality that it leads to people never achieving what they want because they’re unwilling to pay the required price, and over-idolizing those whose success was harder than it looks and not as fun as it seems. 3. An assumption that your view of the world is the view of the world, and a belief that what you’ve seen and experienced are the sights and experiences that explain how the world works. Harry Truman once said: The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it’s brought home with a hammer … I’ve wondered why the next generation can’t profit from the generation before, but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience. Here’s at least one reason why: No lesson is more persuasive than the one you’ve personally experienced. You can try to be empathetic and open-minded to other people’s lives, but when you’re trying to figure out how the world works nothing makes more sense than the unique circumstances of what you’ve lived through firsthand. And the idea that you’ve never seen or experienced 99.999% of what’s happened in the world is hard to swallow because it’s intimidating to admit how little you know. A more comforting story is convincing yourself that what you’ve experienced is the story of how the world works. This is how your career went, so that’s how economics works. These policies benefited you, so this is how politics works. You think what you’ve seen is a reflection of how the world works. What could be more seductive? Yet given how oblivious everyone is to the majority of experiences, what could be more wrong? So everyone goes through life a little blind to the lessons that have already been learned by other people. And it goes well beyond generations: There are massive experience gaps between different nations, socioeconomic classes, races, industries, religions, educations, on and on. The person who grew up in poverty thinks about risk and reward in ways the child of a wealthy banker cannot fathom if he tried. The person who grew up when inflation was high is scared in a way the person who grew up with stable prices isn’t. The stockbroker who lost everything during the Great Depression experienced something the tech worker basking in the glory of the late 1990s can’t imagine. The Australian who went 30 years without a recession has experienced something no American ever has. It leads to all kinds of issues. One is that we’re constantly surprised by events that have been happening forever. Another is that it’s hard to distinguish people who have experienced something you haven’t from people who aren’t smart enough to understand your experiences. A third is that topics like risk, greed, and fear are not the kinds of things that we can learn about and master as a society, like we did with, say, agriculture. As Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” Every generation has to learn on its own, over and over. The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers. But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that would make you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?” 4. An assumption that history is a guide to the future and that things will continue working as they did in the past. A $45 million dam in Colorado designed to prevent flooding turned out to not really be needed because the river it blocked slowed to a trickle. In Rotterdam, the opposite: A dam needs to be replaced a quarter-century sooner than once estimated because it’s under unprecedented stress. Journalist Shayla Love explained the common denominator: Stationarity is the idea that, statistically, the past can help you predict and plan for the future—that the variations in climate, water flow, temperature, and storm severity have remained and will remain stationary, or constant. Nearly all the infrastructure decisions with which we live have been made with the assumption of stationarity. Engineers make choices about stormwater drainage pipes based on past data of inches of rain. Bridge engineers design foundations that can withstand a certain intensity of water flow based on the severity a certain location has experienced in the past. Reservoirs are designed to hold water based on historical information about water flow, and the historical water needs of a community. A seductive belief that exists in almost every field is that things will keep operating like they always have. It’s an almost necessary belief in a world where you have to base a prediction off something. But as Stanford professor Scott Sagan says, “things that have never happened before happen all the time.” All the tim

The best books on time management, as recommended by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals