Betterment

School and work push us to avoid real dreams. Dreamers are dangerous, impatient and unwilling to tolerate the status quo. Existing systems would prefer we simply fit in. The dreams we need to teach…

What’s a car for? Transportation. With reliability. Status. A transaction with the bank. A transaction with the dealer. Your relationship with the neighbors. A statement about your style and …

Everyone has one. It’s the part of ourselves we won’t look at, acknowledge or risk disturbing. It’s the story or trauma or situation that must be avoided at all costs. People will…

Programming? isn't it for the smart people out there? Isn't it boring? If these are your thoughts about programming, you are probably not familiar with programming. Many people out there do programming as a hobby.

Mr. Bridge & The Foggy Morning. In my time writing about Silicon Valley, it has gone from being a place of naive curiosity to where posturing is everything. And the reason we have this state of…

It seems the entire world is talking about ChatGPT and it’s no wonder. Now you can integrate it into Obsidian.

The time we spend fretting over what just happened is time we’re not spending on addressing the problem itself. When your client or your boss turns down a great idea, it’s tempting to f…

Back in the Soviet Union (1917-1991), a lot of books were banned, especially Western ones. So if you wanted important but forbidden voices to be heard,

One of the things I love about the Iliad and the Odyssey is that I always notice new things when I re-read them.  During my last read-through, the importance of baths in both Homeric works stuck out to me.  In Homer, the bath serves as a ritual in several ways. In both the Iliad and […]

When a car is switching gears, the engine is providing no forward power. And it’s more difficult to steer, brake or otherwise control the forward motion of the car as you change it from one g…

If you want to review the grocery list to see if you’ve forgotten anything, alphabetical order is a lousy way to do it. Instead, organizing it by course and then by dish creates a grid and th…

A big part of being a leader is helping people find more meaning in their jobs. “Making meaning” is a fundamental credo in the culture-building game.

Soap is 85 cents a bar or two for a dollar. Which should you buy? It depends. It depends on how much space you have, whether you like this brand, how full your cart is and whether or not you’…

Some of us are cursed to hear the future.

Some of us are cursed to hear the future.

And assertions are maps. Which means that: Budgets Timelines Plans Decision trees and projections are nothing to be afraid of. They’re a gift. They give us the chance to act as if, to describ…

For most people, their siblings will be the longest-lasting relationships of their lives, potentially enduring all the way from birth until past the death of their parents.  Marked by both jealousy and conflict and love and loyalty, siblings are also some of our most complicated relationships. While a little over half of people describe their relationships with their siblings as positive, […]

Even guardians of America's atomic clocks say time doesn't work the way we think it does.

When someone shares too-private information on Instagram in the search for likes. When someone does any kind of dance on TikTok. When someone excitedly joins a multi-level marketing scheme. When someone swears they’re turning over a new leaf for the sixth time in as many years. When someone acts like they’re the first person to […]

This is the season for all the lists–the hot authors, singers and restaurants in any given genre. If you’re on the list, congratulations! You’re the next big thing. For now. But t…

When we’re in execution mode, we swim in signs of our progress. A day’s work stands crisply in some endless checklist: four problems solved; three features added; check and check. Am I on track? Did I...

Adopting new habits is hard! What a shame: New Year’s resolutions could represent such a bright spark of optimism. Instead, they’re a clichéd punchline on the futility of human will. Certainly, my own...

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Random events are unevenly distributed and rarely arrive on time. Resilience and frequency increase the chances that the break we are hoping for will arrive when we need it. The resilience to keep …

18 tips to become a Google Scholar expert — one for every year it’s been around.

The question, of course, is how long? We’ve been working hard on fusion for sixty years (using ‘we’ to include myself with all of humanity, not because I’m a physicist). The…

The right ten books can let you understand the expert consensus for almost any question. Here's how to pick them.

The philosopher and sinologist, Edward Slingerland was on the Infinite Loops podcast recently, where he discussed among other things his 2014 book,