Betterment

So much of modern life relies on specialization. But are you good at all the core activities? The foundations?

What are the standard Johnny.Decimal patterns?

A description of the non-standard 'creative' pattern, for use by people or organisations who create artistic artefacts.

He had a hard time lying because his nose got longer every time he did. Gas-powered leaf blowers would disappear if the smoke they belched out was black instead of invisible. And few people would s…

Ready means that time is up, spec is met and the user can engage. Done might mean that you believe it’s perfect and cannot be improved. We’ll settle for ready. In fact, meeting spec mea…

Consistency. Influencers and pundits from all sectors, but particularly from health and wellness, like to talk about consistency as the key to greatness. "A habit must be established before it can be improved," James Clear writes in Atomic Habits. "If you can't learn the basic skill of showing up, then

Symbols are a funny thing. We all know what they are…. But do we really? What is it about, say, the Pride Flag, a piece of cloth with a lot of brightly

That’s sort of an oxymoron. The original figureheads were carved into the bow of a ship. They exist to express the spirit of the boat and to demonstrate its power and resilience. Here’s…

The best jugglers don’t seem to be trying very hard. That’s because they understand what the work involves, and they don’t confuse effort with results. Some approaches to keep in …

Follow-up on post 22.00.0034.

A trick question is designed to fool us into proposing the wrong answer (example below). A trap question, on the other hand, stops the train completely. A trap question demands an answer, and the a…

Innovation is an infinite game, and the second an organization stops playing that game is the second it begins to cede the lead. As Jeff Bezos said,

I hope that most of us would agree that driving 50 mph in a school zone where little kids cross the street is a significant safety problem. The speed limit is there for good reason, and if you self…

Proverbs from around the world: See that you are wise, but also learn to appear ignorant. (Armenian) If men could foresee the future, they would still behave as they do now. (Russian) Many have suffered for talking; none ever suffered for keeping silent. (Italian) To listen to a lie is harder than to tell it. (Turkish) Not your friend but your enemy will tell you who you are. (Greek) It is not the fault of the post that a blind man cannot see it. (Sanskrit) A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book....

We probably think we use social media as an entertaining distraction. But the deeper drive underlying our urge to keep scrolling is the simple fear of missing out. We ever feel we’re one swipe away from finding ideas that will help advance our careers, inspire our creativity — maybe even allow us to live forever […]

Discover how to gamify your learning process using Obsidian. From flashcards to challenges, learn how to make knowledge acquisition both fun and effective.

The Lean Web Club is my garden of front-end learning. It includes coaching, courses, and coding resources, and right now, I’m running a summer of learning sale. If you sign up today, you get a month of membership for free, plus 30 percent off your next three months. If you sign up for a yearly or lifetime membership, you save even more! Here’s what you get… Coaching Learning web development is hard!

As the old saying goes, “no response is still a response.” And it’s precisely the response Apple CEO, Tim Cook, recently gave to Elon Musk. Cook made a

It’s a pretty simple calculation. How much value per dollar does a freelancer produce for you? What’s the psychic reward for the time you put into your favorite hobby? That machine that…

As Tony Robbins says,“success leaves clues.”  Whenever there is a great accomplishment, we like to examine it, reengineer it, decode it, and learn a

The person you’re working with might not know what you know, might not see what you see. It’s tempting to begin where we are. But it’s more useful to begin where they are.

Human. Alive. Immortal. We think of these as set, binary states. Things you either are or aren’t. You’re either human or nonhuman. Dead or alive. Mortal or immortal. But in truth, these states exist on a continuum, the ends of which you are always moving towards or away from. If humanness is defined by those […]

The alternative to results-oriented thinking is process-oriented thinking. With process-oriented thinking, your focus is on the quality of the decisions that produce the result – the part of the process that you can control, instead of the random variables that you don't control.

Disney is having a bad time of things lately, with some high profile box office flops, or at least, major disappointments. 2023 was the year it really

For thousands of years, and as recently as the 1930s, phrenology was seen as a useful proxy to judge someone’s character. Carefully charting the bumps on someone’s head, along with the …

Near-future science fiction is a fine way to consider our now. Without the reality of today, we can think hard about the tomorrow we’re about to live in. Summer reads are supposed to be a bit…

Since March, I’ve been waking up earlier. Before that time, I’d typically go to bed at 11 p.m. and naturally wake up between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m. Then, for some reason, regardless of what time I went to bed, I started spontaneously waking up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. Consequently, I moved my bedtime earlier, […]

The price of improving structure

When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why ... Read more

The thunderstorm doesn’t know we exist. Rain dances and wishes are ineffective at bringing or preventing a storm, because it isn’t caused by our actions. Metaphorical weather is temptin…