mindsets

Don't control the spike. Control the duration of the long tail.

Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career.

There are two tragedies in life, Oscar Wilde once said: not getting what you want and getting everything you want. The last, he lamented, is much worse. I wanted to be a writer. I don’t know when that dream started, but for a very long time, I craved accomplishment in this creative calling that very few are lucky enough to make a living in, let alone find success in. Of course, like most people, I also fantasized about what it would be like to have money, or more specifically, to have lots of it. It’d be cool to be a little famous too, while I was at it. To be connected with or have influen...

Most people are not strategic. They are reactive.

After more than a decade of writing life-changing advice, I know when to move on. Here’s what else I learned

A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wi…

"On disbelieving atrocities." Written by Arthur Koestler. Originally published on January 9th, 1944.

We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinking simplicity.

If you don’t give money its purpose, it will end up defining yours.

Our choices reflect and determine who we are.

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...