Betterment

If you knew then what you know now, would you have made the same decision? In the last fifty years, more than 25,000,000 Americans have died prematurely due to cigarette smoking. Worldwide, it&#821…

This is one of the great benefits of learning. It’s also a common challenge. When we get better at something, it is preceded by a moment of incompetence. In that moment, we’re not exact…

The three ingredients needed to apply deliberate practice to your career.

There’s been a lot of talk these days about burnout. Pushing too hard, for too long, can do a number on your mental and physical health. Comparatively little discussed is a malady that can be just as pernicious: rust out. Rust out occurs from the under use of your capabilities. Few individuals ever approach the […]

Companies love, love, love talking about how great their values are and how strong their principles are. But as we all know, talk is cheap. The great

What are your goals for this week? What are you building? What will be a good result by...

How elite coders outperform the rest

Steve Pressfield defines Resistance as the inertia, stories and excuses we manage to create to avoid powerful or creative work. Writer’s block, procrastination, overconfidence, or a belief in…

Language shapes our perception of setbacks. Use words other than "failure" to describe situations and to suggest the next step.

Why do we obsess over irrelevant personality quirks, instead of what really drives a person's success?

We often develop slang or codewords to keep the others from understanding what we’re saying. Here’s an example (thanks BK) of the lengths that some are going to be able to talk about Ch…

An echo chamber is created by a marketer to assemble a group of people who are insulated from conventional discourse. It can happen to sports and music fans, to investors, to companies that have co…

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise projects (or your life, or anything else)

Writers always get the advice to be concise, but doing so is easier said than done. These tips and tricks help reduce your word count.

For thousands of years, autumn was a time for harvest. It was a time to pick fruit and reap grain. It was a time to process and preserve produce for storage in attics and cellars, cribs and silos. It was the most labor-intensive season of the year — the big push before the fallow months […]

This week I’m sharing a unanimous learning that came from a “Journey to Staff Engineer” panel I was part of. It is a small change that can have a big impact on your career. Here’s the article; enjoy!

This insight comes from podcast host Chris Williamson, over on the Modern Wisdom podcast, Episode #670. When he was just starting out as a journalist, the

The brain's analytical way of breaking complex things down into atomic parts is important. But it is far from all that is needed.

I’ve been working hard on my juggling (actual juggling, not metaphorical juggling). The secret, as I wrote about in The Practice is the throwing, not the catching. If you get the throws right…

Over on The Knowledge Project Podcast, episode #158, the author, Aaron Dignan, talks about as a company becomes more and more bureaucratic (typically the

In computer science, Big-O notation is a way of talking about what happens to a solution method when the inputs start to increase. For example, sorting numbers is an easy problem when there are onl…

The modern human existence is one dominated by hollow experiences, bullshit, material consumption, and a constant sense of isolation and abandonment, despite being surrounded by masses of people. Why?

Fabled author Ursula Le Guin had a sign over her desk: Is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful? Is it compassionate or at least unharmful? Not a bad place to begin.

When someone is dissatisfied with a product, group, or relationship, how do they remedy that dissatisfaction?  A German economist and political scientist, Albert Hirschman, laid out a theory of how people respond to dissatisfaction in his influential treatise Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.  Hirschman observed that people who find themselves […]

For more than 130 years, we’ve celebrated Labor Day in the US and Canada. And May Day has been around about as long. Around here, it’s become mostly a seasonal marker, but it was founde…

Adults make choices and live with the consequences. No one else should tell us what flavor of ice cream we prefer, or what career to choose. We’re good at knowing what we want. In practice, t…

In the original Star Wars Trilogy (Episodes 4-6), we see Luke Skywalker & Pals blow up a couple of Death Stars, redeem Darth Vader, and defeat the