Betterment

The single best term I’ve learned this year. I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit. Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occur…

It’s easier than ever. Solvents, power tools, market research, AI, committee meetings, online reviews and ennui are all aligned in one direction. To fit all the way in. Of course, once you sa…

In your quest for self-improvement, you’ll likely encounter moments of despair where your current self isn’t anywhere near the ideal self you’ve created in your head. Maybe your ideal self is 50 pounds lighter than your current self. You’ve started working out and watching what you eat, but after three months, you’re only down 10 […]

Tony Soprano, TV’s most famous antihero, is quite a paradox. On one hand, he’s a complete monster who does terrible things. On the other, he’s a pretty

Among the top 500 grossing Hollywood movies of all time, this movie is the most profitable in return on investment. And among all Hollywood movies in the top 1,500 at the box office, Paranormal Act…

I place a lot of value on creativity in my life, and this has been pretty consistent throughout my various life stages. For a long time it was tied to my identity which was tied to my work, and later on it was more of an existential thing: like to me there is not much...

Wesley Faulkner from AWS shares his valuable tips on how to find your next role in DevRel and set yourself up for success.

Coding is a skill that can open up many opportunities in the digital world. Whether you want to create websites, apps, games, or software…

Leveraging strengths -- not "fixing weaknesses" -- is how to win. Better when differentiated. Best when durable. Here's how to create leverage.

The hard part isn’t good ideas. It never has been. The hard part is choosing. Ask GPT for ten subtitles for your book, or sixteen ways to hold a surprise party, and you’ll be delighted …

If so, it might be worth learning. If so, it might pay to let someone who has learned it take care of it. Coding is a skill. But it’s not clear that the person who knows how to code should be…

A new office tool is infecting thought and communication with the worst symptoms of design thinking.

Have you ever had an interaction with someone where you asked them question after question about themselves, but they never asked you a single thing? What was supposed to be a cooperative, back-and-forth dance, became a one-sided monologue. They did all the talking; you did all the listening. There’s a name for this all-too-common phenomenon: […]

Robert Johnson is known as the king of the Delta blues. One reason is that his small output was brilliant. The other, bigger reason is that the recordings that remain of his short life are among th…

Evolutionary social scientist (and also one of the co-founders of Cards Against Humanity of all things), David Pinsof, has one of the most amusing blogs

Learn what “Building a Second Brain” is, how it relates to the Zettelkasten Method, and how to perfectly combine both methods.

If you go to a health food store and buy some pills with selenium, colloidal silver or other mysterious substances in them, it’s possible that they’ll make you feel a bit better. On the…

Elon Musk is thought to have paid about $44 billion to buy Twitter. That was last October.  Yesterday he made his latest attempt to wreck it. He posted these tweets: Not only did he introduce limits on the number of tweets a person could see when his whole business model is utterly...

The future never arrives, of course, but it has a powerful force that’s impossible to avoid. We can see it as a threshold, a doorway toward something new. Or we can fight it as an unwanted ch…

When Americans think back to the War of Independence, most are apt to feel that, had they lived back then, they would have been Patriots for sure. In retrospect, the decision to rebel and get out from under the thumb of British rule seems inevitable. Yet only around a third of colonists ever declared themselves […]

You come home from a hard day at work feeling like you could use a stiff drink. You contemplate sleeping in and skipping your morning workout because you stayed up a little later than usual last night. Your kid is throwing a tantrum in a store because he wants you to buy him a toy. […]

Some puzzles about the best way to learn. What do you think works best?

One show can make Netflix’s year. One stock can make the numbers for an investor. One player can drive a team to victory. The key is, “I’m not sure which one it’s going to b…

Digital abundance creates a new problem. Most of our lives are filled with “or” decisions. You can have this or that. You can save money for the big party or you can go out for lunch. Y…

According to Ray Dalio, mankind’s highest purpose is to evolve. Why? Because evolution is the fundamental nature of the universe. Not just with living

For a certain cohort of high-performing students at famous colleges, graduate school feels irresistible. If you’re good at school, the challenge and offer of law school, med school or a famou…

Culture makes it tempting (and easy) to insulate ourselves from reality. Credit card debt is an invisible burden, until it’s not. Ignoring the changes in our climate makes our days easier, bu…