Betterment

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…

Everything added to your schedule necessitates subtracting something else. A truth we ignore at our peril.

If you can’t answer that six-word question, you’re selling a commodity. Organizations don’t buy things, people do. And people at companies aren’t spending their own money, s…

The Choluteca Bridge, in Honduras, was built in an area known for hurricanes and other strong weather. It was designed to withstand the destructive force of a hurricane so when hurricane Mitch came through later that same year, it was no surprise that the bridge sustained only minor damage. Clearly, it had been designed and implemented well.

Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Without UX, “data-driven” organizations can only use that data to confirm their biases, not to understand where to change course.

Driving a tank in the Second World War was a high-stakes, scary, and dangerous job.  So tank crews did what humans tend to do in unpredictable,

Dan Dennett explained that it began as a survival mechanism. It’s important to predict how someone else is going to behave. That tiger might be a threat, that person from the next village mig…

There are a number of cases where excessive pressure in the software development process leads to certain perhaps undesirable designs.

Perfect output is not the desired outcome.

Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones. The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then anothe…

Have you ever been in a hotel room with your spouse and kids, tucked away in this liminal space, enjoying the feeling that no one could find you (and kind of hoping that no one ever would), and thought to yourself: “This is all I need in the world”? There has been some lament in […]

There’s the immutable law of business: whenever a new way of working comes long, albeit from tech or social change, people will try to game it. So be it

Learn how to spot the difference between and expert and an imitator with 5 key tells.

They serve different purposes. The fence near the train tracks is a boundary. You can go near it without risk. The electrified third rail, on the other hand, is a limit. If you touch it, you’…

Aka "in media res"

Do not assume bad intentions. Listen and understand.

Impatience is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective.

When we think of scaling the work, we’re typically thinking of stories that are grouped within features or epics, which might be grouped inside even larger items. This is vertical scaling and is fairly common. There is another type of scaling, which we need to also consider, and that is horizontal.

Why do we buy the pitch of the snake oil salesman, the flim-flam man, the con artist, the demagogue or the trickster? As our modern world becomes more informed and more rational, we see an increase…

Hacking and making are great fun due to their open ended nature, but being able to try anything can make the task of selecting your next project daunting. [Steph Piper] is here with her Maker Skill…

What a waste. Something went wrong, and the other person cared enough about the relationship to let you know. Perhaps they’re hoping that you can rebuild a bridge. That you can see what they …

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Second Breakfast, and I cannot begin to articulate how relieved I am that, after everything I've been through – the book, the pandemic, the death, the grief – I've started to write again. Thank you so much for subscribing to this newsletter and helping me

There’s nothing wrong with abundance and joy. But being spoiled causes two real problems: it makes it difficult to appreciate what you have. If perfect is the standard, it’s rarely met …

If you want to be more productive, the data are clear—where you work matters much more than how hard you work.