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As you might’ve already guessed, my approach to thinking about career planning is to read a lot. We should probably pause a bit to consider if this is a valid strategy. Let’s work backwards. The idea at the core of career strategy is that you have to make

A summary of everything I know on the topic of building career moats.

A thinking trap for those of us who are analytical.

Why it's sometimes limiting to optimise for mission, especially if you're at the start of your career.

The most important lesson I learnt from writing and launching a book in 2019, applicable to all those who've decided to take on self-directed work in their lives.

Why we need to be careful when using frameworks from the field of judgment and decision making.

A simple trick to use whenever you're thinking of doing a massive career change: find the people who have failed, and ask them why.

Actionable books are books that contain techniques or approaches you may apply to your life. Here's how to read them.

Successful practitioners use 'optimise for usefulness' over 'optimise for truth'. Unintended side effect: this means it's ok to believe in religion, so long as it doesn't harm you.

Dismissive stubbornness is the worst kind of stubborn, and the only character trait I can’t tolerate on my team.

Why it's probably a good idea to keep a list of questions in your head. Also how I find topics to write about.

Why ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ isn't as great a thinking tool as you might think.

Wanting is about the origins of desire. In deriving how desires form, Burgis shows us how to understand what we want and better navigate life.

A brief summary and review of Luke Burgis's book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

You can't pursue expertise if you're scared of starting. Why it's better to get numb first before you focus on getting good.

A Framework for Putting Mental Models to Practice is a series that examines the idea of putting Charlie Munger's Elementary Worldly Wisdom to practice in one's life in the pursuit of better decision making.

The best Commonplace posts in one place.

The rise of the knowledge worker is probably linked to the rise of meditation and mindfulness. When you are paid for your thinking, it pays to have your thinking be the best it can possibly be.

Why the Internet has driven writing to sound ever more insightful, how writers accomplish this, and what to do about it.

What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today.

A reading technique that's ridiculously simple, and surprisingly effective when used in service of reading for career goals.

Notes on augmenting ‘Get Things Done’ time management with a three-tiered model of personal review.

Piers Steel's Procrastination Equation is a reasonably effective method of tackling procrastination. Here's a summary of the equation.

What if we treated time management as a bet allocation problem? Say that we have a finite number of hours, which we might spend on a variety of career activities. How do we figure out what to spend our time on, instead of merely thinking about time management as how to tackle our todo lists?

Everything that's helped me read a book a week, even with a full-time job.

Why the best way to get a reading speedup is to read a lot about some specific topic.

There are 3 kinds of non-fiction book: 💁‍♀️ narrative, 🌳 tree, and 🌿 branch. Not every non-fiction book is worth reading, and not every book should be read the same way. These categories explain why.