Betterment

Here’s a useful habit that’s more than a hack… The next time things are going well, when a project is about to launch, when a meeting has been successful, when the sun is shining&…

Solo mediocrity is rampant, of course. We know that toasting the bread before making the sandwich makes it more delicious, but in service of convenience and speed, we skip a step. It becomes a cons…

Those who do not master the exploitive reading method waste a lot of time and energy. Not every book should be processed in the same way.

Even in the age of smartphones and GPS, stories of hikers getting lost in the wilderness still regularly appear in the news. How do people get lost even when carrying their devices, and what should you do if you ever find yourself in that situation? To answer those questions, I called up Creek Stewart, a […]

Note: This excerpt, condensed from the original, was taken from Masterful Personality by Orison Swett Marden, a book which was published in 1921 and is worth reading in its entirety. “A man is not all included between his hat and boots,” said Walt Whitman. There is something in a man which does not inhere in […]

Modern life has a modern problem: we don't have to do anything.

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For extraordinary long-term success in business we can look to insights from British Olympic cycling, Roger Federer and neuroeconomics.

I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper […]

This article is a list of things that I wish that I understood earlier in my career. There's no time machine, but I can share them with you!

It’s so tempting to write for everyone. But everyone isn’t going to read your work, someone is. Can you tell me who? Precisely? What did they believe before they encountered your work? …

We’re born into chaos, spend our lives seeking order, and die realizing we never had control. This is the human condition. And it’s not hard to see why.

The end of the trail is usually difficult, but without the long and winding approach, there isn’t much of a mountain. The greatest hits reel and the stunning photographs leave out most of the…

Earlier this month, Virginia Sole-Smith, bestselling author of Fat Talk, published a podcast/essay titled "Nobody Cares About Your 'Health and Fitness' Journey." I'm not a premium subscriber to her Burnt Toast newsletter, I confess, so I couldn't listen or read; and it's never great to judge a book by

Google made a fortune and honed sponsored search results into an art form. The theory is that people who want the traffic the most will pay for the clicks, and of course, if the advertisers don&#82…

In June 1940, during the darkest period of WWII for the British, Winston Churchill gave his famously defiant “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech

Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful, it is difficult to decide that today’s the day to start writing engineering strategy. When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy write so much strategy that your organization is overwhelmed and ignores your strategy rather than investing time into understanding it. Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful of useful mental models to avoid both extremes. This chapter covers:

On The Vergecast: 9 different ways to get things done, with a little help from The Verge’s staff.

If you have a series of tasks to do, it’s easier to ignore this question and simply get back to work. Doing the tasks is more efficient than coordinating the help. But if your work is a proje…

In the very small business, the freelancer knows each customer. By name, by volume, by preferences. And in the huge business, expensive software, data analysts and relentless margin seeking pushes …

According to the very first story in Herodotus’ Histories (c. 440 BC, the oldest nonfiction book in the Western Canon), King Croesus was the richest man

On My Mind Reminder: After decades of predicting and writing about the future, we end up looking either geniuses or idiots. This 1995 Newsweek article brushing off the internet as “useless” shows w…

I came across this (ironically) anonymous quote recently: “The offline world is full of sticks, but the internet only has carrots.” When we come together in groups, it can bring out the best …

Scientists have long known the mental and creative benefits of total absorption in an activity. But what causes it, and how can we achieve it?

I ran across an interesting term/concept in Miranda July’s All Fours: third things. A character in the book attributes it to

One of my friends, an outstanding programmer who likes to fly under the radar, frequently tells me he admires my “ability to broadcast”. I guess he refers to the fact that I’m keeping a blog, and that I’m not afraid of writing with transparency about my adventures in software engineering. To me, it all feels natural, so his comment motivated me to explain in more detail why I’m doing what I’m doing.

On The Vergecast: Google’s productivity guru shares her secrets.

The conflict is real. “Jean-Michel [Basquiat] called,” Mr. Warhol wrote in his diary on Sept. 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wo…

When we think about purpose, we typically think of our life’s overarching aim; our true calling; the thing we were put on earth to do. But each individual’s purpose encompasses more than this, and in fact exists across three horizons that stretch from the imminent and concrete to the distant and transcendent. In the first […]