Betterment

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 […]

It’s such an odd thing to say. The benefit of the doubt is withheld from many of us, options are unevenly distributed and indoctrination is real. And yet… no matter where we begin, we e…

It’s something of a cliche to observe that Westerners typically avoid thinking about death, and live their lives less meaningfully, and urgently, as a result. Less commonly explained are the subtle ways this avoidance takes place, beyond simply averting one’s eyes while driving past a funeral home. Our denial of death can be seen in […]

The best way for a movie studio to outperform is to attract and encourage creators with vision, drive and commitment. And yet, the key executives might be spending their time and focus and effort o…

The University of Tasmania recently awarded an honorary doctorate degree to Hannah Gadsby, who then gave an address to the gradu

For collaborative, multiplayer, spatial products, the performance of the prototype is key — you need to deliver a smooth experience.

Quality is defined as consistently meeting spec. A measurable promise made and kept. Effort is what happens when we go beyond our normal speed. When we dig deep and exert physical or emotional labo…

A feeling of entitlement is hard won. You suffered to get to this spot. You were mistreated. You worked hard. You paid your dues. You were treated unfairly. It’s your turn. Justice demands it…

Life is a series of projects. Well chosen projects can help you achieve your ambitions, and life a better, richer, and more meaningful life.

We each have an inner critic. And they can be paralyzing. Still, as Scrum Inc.’s Brian Hackerson explains, we must learn to listen to that inner critic in order to change it to an inner advocate. Reducing the time it takes to make that switch works the same way as reducing decision latency in a Scrum Team or Agile organization.

Editor’s note: Our podcast this week on the benefits of forgetting reminded us of this excerpt — an even more philosophic take on the subject — from The Crown of Individuality (published 1909) by William George Jordan. For more WGJ, we highly recommend picking up a copy of The Secrets to Power, Mastery and Truth: […]

What happened to the once venerable tradition of the army surplus store? In this article we chart its rise and fall.

Tortilla chips made with “love.” (Though that likely isn’t among the top five emotions experienced by the worker who churns out those chips on the factory line.) Companies that refer to their employees as “family.” (Because dear kin will terminate your relationship without warning and give you fifteen minutes to pack your stuff and vacate […]

We’d probably be better off if we could simply say, “I’m afraid.” Our culture has persistently reminded us that the only thing to fear is fear itself, that confessing fear i…

Twenty years from now, you will have new skills. New customers. A new title and a new kind of leverage. All of this forward motion requires a less celebrated element–all the things you’…

The first mindset is pretty common. Take good notes. Make tiny changes. Repeat. Improve. Incrementally move along the asymptote. Test and measure. The other mindset is rare indeed. Do things that m…

Focus sounds limiting, but it results in more getting done. Here's how to stop day-dreaming and finally make progress.

We’ve talked before about the power of using the principle of via negativa to improve your life. Instead of focusing on what you should start doing to make your life better, it often pays to think about what you can stop doing. It’s addition by subtraction. Some of the things you should eliminate from your […]

Every day around 3 pm, my dog takes a nap. As far as dogs go, he has a ton of available options. He could hang in the backyard, chase a squirrel, whatever. But in that moment, every day, the choice…

If you have a million Twitter followers, that means that 99.9% of the people on Twitter are ignoring you, which, with a little rounding, means you have 0%. If you write a book and it sells a millio…

Self-management skills let you manage your thoughts, actions, and emotions to achieve maximum productivity.

A simple rule that every good, veteran programmer seems to follow with respect to managing their time.

My current project is a deep dive into the science and philosophy of learning by doing. (Which, ironically, has me reading a lot of books!) Since my last post sharing interesting books was surprisingly well-received, I figured I’d share some more. Here are ten books I found thought-provoking: 1. Metaphors We Live By by George […]

While embedded on an Army outpost in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan, journalist Sebastian Junger recorded many incisive insights into the nature of martial living, including this one on the soldiers’ nightly routine: “At eight o’clock the generator cuts out and everyone goes to their bunks; after that, the only men awake […]

Ten years ago, if you were as good at using networks and software as you are today, most of your peers would have considered you some sort of wizard. The question isn’t whether or not each of…

Akimbo, an independent B corp., continues to show us how cohort-based learning can change lives for the better. I hope you’ll check out what my friends at Akimbo are up to: The Early Decision…