Betterment

“We will deliver this project on time” — But what is the probability of it?

Bullies use intimidation and power to force others to act against their best interests. Bullies blame the victim, assuring everyone that they wouldn’t have to use force if people would simply…

By Damian Flanagan You sometimes hear of concepts in foreign cultures that you can understand in a kind of vague, historical way. Take for example th

Time passes. And humans have always kept track. Distribution and technology combined to create a few decades where the tear off daily calendar was nearly ubiquitous (read on for details on my new o…

Along the way, we have been taught to associate character skills like honesty, rationality, agreeableness, grit and care with surface metrics like wealth or power. That’s almost certainly inc…

Let’s say one day you break a coffee cup by dropping it on the floor. Nothing fancy, but an irreplaceable piece of great sentimental value to you. Sure,

I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creati…

Some people have no problem attracting others. Everyone wants to work with them, to be their friend, to have them on their team. Other people have little luck in making and keeping relationships. Their overtures for connection are routinely rejected, and they typically cannot understand why. We often think that the formation of relationships is […]

Shrug your shoulders, care less, phone it in. One software company I used to depend on has sort of given up. They have plenty of cash in the bank, but they simply stopped trying. You can feel it in…

Most of what we do here at Hackaday is look out for cool projects and then write them up so that you all know about them. Nothing is better than being really stoked about a clever hack and then bei…

To get your child potty trained, I see three approaches: Nature - Leave toilets around, let kid see you using them, and figure it out. Culture - Emphasize how much your respect toilet users, and look down on others

Big football at colleges in the US costs more than $5 billion a year. And none of these programs has a student acting as a coach. The same analysis, at a much smaller scale, applies to school theat…

There are three trends in copywriting that have been so overused they should now be avoided. The first two: Headlines with “why” for articles that don’t actually explain why. Head…

In 1995, two years before he came back to run Apple, Steve Jobs made an interesting point. He was asked why Apple (which fired him a decade earlier) was

Because of the coincidental confluence of two books coming into my life at the same time — Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson and Economics by Aristotle — I’ve been thinking a lot about household management this year.  Part of that reflection has been philosophical. I’ve contemplated the Greek […]

I am taking a year to strengthen my own foundations in life, while working with a group of people who want to do the same.

Rome was built in a day. It wasn’t finished in a day. In fact, it’s still not finished. But the day someone said, “this is Rome,” and announced the project, it was there. So…

Knowledge and technique used to be closely guarded secrets. Admission to the guild was reserved for a few, and crafts like typesetting, plumbing and medicine were off limits to most folks. One of t…

Atticus Finch, the patriarch in one of the great post-war novels, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” is a very compelling character. When we first open the book,

Explain it with quadrants? Translate it into Spanish? It’s easy to memorize a few words that purport to explain something, but all they do is relabel it. If you truly understand something, yo…

I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is ... Read more

Blame the clients. And blame the conditions. But then, you’re on the hook to get better tools, find better clients and work in better conditions. It’s not convenient, but it’s pos…

The people most likely to sign up for coaching or additional learning are the folks who are already good at their craft. “I’m terrible at this,” can lead to, “and I don&#821…

We see a lot of hacks where the path to success is pretty obvious, if maybe strewn with all sorts of complications, land-mines, and time-sinks. Then we get other hacks that are just totally out-of-…

Community requires individuals to have the option of speaking up. If we’re in this together, we ought to be able to chime in. But while every member of the community can speak out, the ones t…

If we’re to publish, teach, invent, imagine or promote, we need the confidence to believe that we have something to offer. That we are, in some way, right. But the enterprise of rational thou…

When we embark on ambitious projects we hope our friends will support us. It doesn't always turn out that way.

Napoleon didn’t conquer most of Europe all by himself. He had other people helping him, of course. Literally armies of them. The reality is, it’s not the

It’s pretty easy for some kids to switch gears. They can go from sad to ebullient in seconds, and switch contexts without much fuss. Others have more trouble. As we get older, our natural abi…