Betterment

Every year I ask myself these 40 questions. I’ve shared this list with my family and closest friends, and always enjoy discussing answers as we reflect on th...

The term “vanilla” is often used to describe something ordinary, plain, or standard. In my book, there’s nothing less vanilla than vanilla.

A world where knowledge is captured and categorized, interpreted by the masses almost instantaneously digested, regurgitated, masticated, ruminated.

My passion is teaching coaches, health professionals and educators evidence-based tools and techniques so they can confidently help their clients achieve long-term success through the power of habits.

Humans are unique. We give names to the days of the week (we even have weeks). We eat something different for breakfast than dinner. We chronicle the passage of time. In fact, our chronicling of ti…

Organizations lie all the time. Big lies, sometimes, but usually small ones. Is the call volume actually unusually heavy? Did a chef really prepare this meal just for me? These fiblets are so commo…

“You can try this at home…” But you probably won’t. The secret recipe isn’t the reason Coke is successful. And the recipe for KFC isn’t much of a recipe at all. …

When I include links to various books and items on this blog, your purchases generate a small royalty that I earmark for worthy causes. This year, we were able to help BuildOn and the community in …

“A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways.” -“Systemantics” by John Gall   Incidents are stressful but inevitable. Even services designed for availability will eventually encounter a failure. Engineers naturally find it daunting to defend their systems against the “infinite number of ways” things can go wrong.  Our team found ourselves in…

Orchestras are difficult. One reason is that we’re really good at noticing when they’re out of tune. Just a tiny bit off changes our perception of the sound. The other reason is that if…

Marketing as we know it happened because of machines. Machines made factories dramatically more efficient, which meant that producers could no longer easily sell everything they made. When you go f…

It’s Christmas Eve and the Holiday Season is in full swing. Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, all the good stuff. All of these traditions are very old, of

Automation How would you like to have notes automatically …

Capacitive touch buttons are a great way to turn just about any (non-conductive) surface into a button, but people generally dislike the lack of tactile feedback.  [KontinuumLab] apparently agreed …

Well, maybe not. In 2024, worldwide gift card sales will pass a trillion dollars for the first time. It’s a good grift. Surveys show that the buyer spends about 21% less per gift than they do…

Last year I was the 27th of four hundred and freaking eight people to write about their default apps, and I though it would be fun to turn this into a tradition and revisit the list to see if anything has changed since last year. ✨ next to each change from

Our old friend, Rory Sutherland has a piece of advice: “Be good at two things.” A Marine who knows how to fight is good. A Marine who knows how to fight

Explore the complexities of Chinese names and their Hanyu Pinyin transliteration, which can create ambiguity, even for native speakers.

The best way to complain is to make things better. Complaining can be a form of intimacy. It’s a useful way to explain our behavior. And best of all, it gives us a way to communicate as we wo…

Modern marketing culture is designed to amplify our desires. To turn faint wants into desperate needs. As a result, we’re intimately familiar with what we want. And we strive to get it. The p…

In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it. This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, …

Great companies and teams often get stale and then fade away. Here’s what we hear as it happens: “I’m way too important to listen to customers. Send them to the call center.&#8221…

Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer. The shift in labor led to an explosion …

Asymmetrical information creates real problems. And fixing the flow of useful proxies benefits both sides. Cigarette companies knew a great deal about the addictions they were causing and the illne…

A generation ago, the Generals ruled. General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, General Dynamics… they were big, and they had a lot to lose. As a result, people trusted them to show up an…

If it happened to us, our memory of it is a story, our record of it with us at the center. Even if it’s on video, even if other people were there, our narrative and the context and the play b…

Lousy tools are dangerous. They endanger our safety (physical or emotional) and undermine our work. Lousy tools are pretty easy to avoid, because they reveal themselves whenever we use them. Great …

Want to be better with money? Here are ten books + the one-minute summary of what you need to know.