Betterment

The engineer’s over-engineered knowledge management system

In this challenging climate, even industry giants are forecasting profits declines. However, brands with purpose are well-positioned to lead.

A lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion for remote teams.

I just finished Benjamín Labatut’s remarkable book When We Cease To Understand The World. It’s a book that blends non-fiction and fiction, that tells the stories of scientists of the tw…

It’s tempting to go to an extreme. Unreasonable design standards, quality or hospitality are an effective way to gain share, delight customers and spread the word. To be unreasonable in servi…

Anything that works in practice can work in theory. When a theory tells us something that is working is impossible, we’ve either measured wrong or the theory needs updating. Theories exist to…

Of course, we make strategic errors all the time. Not enough time. Incomplete information. A fast-changing system. Sooner or later, a significant strategic error occurs. Don’t beat yourself u…

Designing a values-centered life from first principles.

Myth, Meaning, and the Last Stand of Democratic Consciousness

A while ago, I ate in a restaurant that had no menu. The waiter simply walked over to the table and said, “what do you want?” As bold a statement as this is, it made many diners uncomfo…

Image by Dosseman, via Wikimedia Commons In 2012, archaeologists discovered in Southern Turkey a well-preserved mosaic featuring a skeleton savoring a loaf of bread and a pitcher of wine, surrounded by the Greek words “Be cheerful and live your life.” Dating back to the 3rd century BCE, the mosaic likely adorned the dining room of a wealthy villa in the ancient Greco-Roman city of Antioch.

Who do you pay attention to? Do you respond or react to the feedback that’s coming in? Do you seek it out or wait for it to arrive? Does vivid online feedback from anonymous trolls carry more…

There’s been a popular statistic floating around for years from Gallup about how only 38% of the US workforce feels engaged at work. They claim this is a

(Car dashboards don’t have room to spell out the whole word). On a country road, late at night, when there are no other cars around, the hi beams are a really useful tool. It’s smart to…

Understanding and maintaining your circle of competence is crucial for software engineers. This post explores how self-awareness, continuous learning, and avoiding overconfidence lead to sharper decisions and greater impact.

Perhaps you’re really good at the job. Hard charging. Focused on every interaction and staying in control. It’s easy to justify the hard work because you refuse to settle. It turns out …

Karen Armstrong once said, “We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we cannot find significance and

At least the Powerball tells the truth. In a state run lottery, the deal is very simple: You pay your money, you take your chances. The government randomly chooses a winner and the winner gets a bi…

Is it okay to dress your cat in a ridiculous costume? What about giving a poodle a haircut that subjects him to ridicule? The cat and the dog probably don’t know or care, but we think less of…

So you thought you had a bad week last week… The CEO and Head of HR of a New England AI startup, Astronomer.io, just had their careers implode when they

I stumbled across this July 2019 article by Arthur C. Brooks about professional decline and it gave me lots to think about: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. One of the takeaways is that different stages of your life requ

It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it. But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a futur…

It’s tempting to seek out the easy gigs and the straightforward projects. But of course, if they’re the easy ones, there’s probably quite a few people eager to do them. So your ab…

Not every pastime long linked with well-dressed men is truly gentlemanly. From James Bond’s baccarat tables to Don Draper’s decanters, popular culture

First mistake: If you meet a talking dog in the street and it makes a few grammatical errors or speaks with an accent, you don’t use a few errors to dismiss the fact that this is an actual ta…

A recurring theme in my ongoing Foundations project is evolutionary mismatch. This is the idea that our bodies and behavior were designed for a different sort of environment than we live in today. Since evolution is slow, we haven’t had time to adapt new instincts that safeguard us from novel dangers. Exercise is an example. […]

Should you have to? I made a mistake. I used a QR code service a year ago, and now that my year’s payment is up, they’re going to delete the code. It turns out I wasn’t buying wha…

It’s all too easy to be familiar with being underappreciated. Customers, clients, vendors, colleagues–we’d like them to notice and acknowledge our efforts on their behalf. When we…

Everything that happened yesterday, and the yesterdays before that, is real. It happened. Perhaps it’s the hard work you did to earn a degree, or a significant error that cost you and others …