Betterment

I was sitting in a friend’s study the other day, and noticed that he had hundreds of books I’d never read. Each was written, perhaps over the course of a year (or a decade), by a smart,…

When do we get better through direct practice? A deep dive into the research and its practical implications.

What do you own?What are you really good at?What do you enjoy? Engaging with the marketplace requires creating value for people who have a choice. And deciding what to offer your customers is your …

Big company CEOs get paid ridiculous amounts of money, but the good ones also do something that most of us avoid. They make decisions. In fact, that’s pretty much the core of the job. Whether…

The curse of knowledge is all about not remembering what you know, combined with not understanding what your audience knows, leading to confusion.

Cho explains how an injury on set gave him a new outlook, and how he’s getting his creativity back to basics.

Some products, some services, some experiences are just right. It’s hard to know how to make them simpler, more beautiful or more useful…

Since publishing my second book, Staff Engineer, I’ve had more folks popping up for publishing advice. I’ve written a few times about my experience writing books in Self-publishing Staff Engineer (2021) and What I learned writing a book (2019), but neither directly confronts the two questions that folks keep asking, “Should I write a book?” and “How do I publish a book?”

At work, the Staff engineering team has a monthly meeting. The agenda varies but most recently we talked about a common theme: how do you find career progression after reaching your organization’s terminal level?

If your roof is leaking, the water in the basement will gradually move up until you’ve got a full-blown flood. And for most humans, for twenty years, each day we get a little taller. It&#8217…

Tug boats don’t usually tug. They push. That’s because pushing is more mechanically efficient than pulling. When we pull, there’s tension and slack in the ropes, and the attachmen…

Every kid knows that no two are the same. The thing is, at appropriate magnification, if we’re paying attention and deciding to care, that applies to just about everything in the natural worl…

Martin Tingley with Wenjing Zheng, Simon Ejdemyr, Stephanie Lane, Michael Lindon, and Colin McFarland

It feels odd to hear the flight attendants remind us to put on our own mask before helping others. That’s backward, isn’t it? The theory is that if you can’t breathe, it’s p…

Doing work well, for its own sake, is a surer route to satisfaction than worldly success. Some meditations on C. S. Lewis's The Inner Ring.

No one is going to steal it. Not if it’s actually a big idea. One thing that big ideas have in common is that they’re almost impossible to give away. You could have bought Amazon stock …

From ancient times til the present, the ideal warrior has been celebrated as a man of both thought and action, with a mind as finely honed as his sword. Since the 19th century, the Marine Corps has directed its members to pursue that ideal by issuing a list of recommended reading to members of its […]

Ask any graphic designer or architect, and they’ll tell you that, much to their chagrin, clients have a much easier time expressing what they don’t like about a draft or mock-up than conveying what they’d rather have it look like instead. Individuals often evince this same dynamic in designing the architecture of their lives. “I […]

We generally adopt a posture of optimism or pessimism as a response (or reaction) to external events. We see how things are unfolding and make a decision about what to expect. We feel like we need …

Editor’s note: The following excerpt was taken from the chapter “How to Make Habit Your Friend,” included in The Technique of Getting Things Done (1947) by Donald Laird.  “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” is one of the simplest ways of putting habit to work for you to get things done. Consistency is the […]

In the end, our numbers will always be wrong. It is our choice whether we want to blindly believe or continue to test and refine them.

No matter what anyone says, simplicity is anything but simple.

Seek simplicity, but distrust it.

Complexity in business is a natural occurrence. Read on, and we’ll show you how simple it is to alleviate your business’s complexity.

Do you know someone at work who seems almost immune to the chaos around them? These three focus areas can help you effectively manage complexity as well.

There are two confusions. The first is that the next big idea must be fully original. The second is that it have no competition. This is almost never the case. Henry Ford didn’t invent the ca…

Daily habits or intense, one-off projects? In this article I explain why both are necessary to do great things.

Have you been waking up early, writing in your journal, meditating, exercising, drinking eight glasses of water a day, and planning your week religiously for months and months, but aren’t seeing any real progress in your life? What gives?  Since we were little kids, haven’t we been told that if we exercise discipline, we’ll be […]