Betterment

Perhaps your wedding package includes a cake. It’s paid for, better eat it. Even if you’re allergic to wheat. Perhaps the amusement park includes as many rides as you like, even if you&…

Tim Urban has a new book, What’s Our Problem?, whose main thesis is that our minds have two modes, and high and a low mind. The high mind more seeks truth, while the low mind more seeks loyalty via confirming sacred beliefs. The high mind thinks like a scientist, especially in an “idea lab”. It realizes that it might be wrong, avoids bias or idea attachment, is open to stumbling and backtracking, and systematically collects hypotheses and data to carefully compare the two.

Rejection, not acceptance, defines writing life.

We often use words like “beautiful” or “stunning” or “perfect” when we actually mean “popular” or “pleasant.” Every day is beautiful in i…

They say leaders eat last. While this is slowly becoming a pithy, overused catchphrase, it’s also a powerful maxim that reminds leaders of their primary

While Drafts is my ever present information capture app, Obsidian is the destination for a large amount of that information as I build the content into cross-referenced, meaningful notes. Much like Drafts, Obsidian has a framework through which people can develop plug in solutions (literally “plugins” - core and community), which in many ways mimics Drafts’ actions. While some of my own work on Drafts actions has yielded libraries and reusable actions that others can build into workflows, the nature of some of the amazing plugins in Obsidian takes things further and uses plugins to open portals to allow you to interact directly with the underlying Obsidian API. As a result you can build some quite useful commands without having to build your own plugin. In this post I am going to share the construction of some simple ‘path-based’ command examples to illustrate how you can take advantage of this.

How do people lose their spouse, their faith, their grip on their values, goals, and dreams? It doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens through tiny shifts: a steady accumulation of daily, imperceptible deviations from one’s set course. A little more attention is given to one thing than another. A frame […]

If you came of age in say, the late nineties or sooner, there were two rules you had to know: 1. Google is unstoppable, nobody can take search away from

Years ago, Adam Savage put forward a concept he calls “first order retrievability.” The idea is to put as much of your shop on casters as possible, and then, when working on a specific …

Using wardley mapping to map my skills and focus on career development

The learning curve is familiar to many people. It might be steep, but it’s continuous. Organizations (and people) work their way up it, one step at a time (it’s the black line in the gr…

A well-turned curse can remind you of the power of language.

Creating an unchangeable five-year plan is misguided. But creating a list of personal and professional goals you’d like to achieve can be motivating.

You’ve heard of the seven-year-itch. It’s the sense of restlessness or dissatisfaction that supposedly sets in after you’ve been with someone for seven years of time. It’s most often talked about in the context of romantic relationships but is also applied to one’s “relationship” with something like a job or place. While the seven-year-itch is […]

The alphabet is a miracle, one that is compounded by books. And the lessons we learn from this cornerstone of modern culture apply to organizations, meetings, tech, politics and almost everything w…

My way of thinking about long-term habit building

Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning. (E.g. recent movie Living.) Both groups agree: the world is far more boring than it need be. But why?

Toxic productivity culture and trying to optimize every moment of our day has let to largest mental health epidemic ever recorded.

In 1965, CEOs at the top 350 publicly owned US firms made 20 times as much as their average employee. In 2021, they made 400 times as much. This dramatic

In 1979, the page-a-day calendar was born. It’s basically a book on its side, but the user rips off a page each day. My friend Michael Cader took this concept and ran with it, creating calend…

Last summer I created a Drafts action for a user to allow them to mark some text in IA writer’s Markdown syntax for a highlight. Now my solution was not the first solution offered, but it was a little different to the others, and I have been meaning to write it up for quite some time now to go into a bit more detail about how it works and the benefits it provides over other, existing solutions.

A myth, once circulated, can last a long time. That’s because our cognitive machines are rife with glitches. (The existence of these glitches is the

Twenty years ago, it didn’t seem like a burdensome task to write a handwritten letter to a loved one. Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t a big deal to write a long email to a friend. Today, it can feel hard to motivate yourself to tap out a two line response to a text. The feeling […]

What I got from creating a visual representation of my career and the things I’ve learned over time

Find Out What 10x Developers Don’t Want You To Know

Say you want to learn French. Would you do better if you studied for 100 hours in a year-long course (~2 hours per week) or if those hours were compressed into a month (~20 hours per week)? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be that more intensive language education programs do better! This appears to be […]

The way we think about our priorities makes a huge difference. Leaders of every stripe make one thing more than any other: decisions. In any environment with constraints (which is, actually, any en…

The world changes and we have a choice: • Fight hard to keep it the way it was. • Notice what happened and then decide to do something with that insight. Thirty years ago, AOL was my company’…

It’s not hypocritical to help yourself at a buffet at the same time you counsel the owner of the restaurant to limit the number of trips that people take so that the restaurant can become sus…