Betterment

In the days of hand drafting, architectural lettering was taught to all Architecture and Industrial Design majors. (My graduating class was one of the last ID classes to draft by hand, and they were already phasing it out.) This type of lettering evolved from the days of drafting

Our stories about brains are all invented. If a stunning surrealistic painting turns out to have been painted by an elephant or a toddler, does that make it less beautiful? If an essay on the natur…

How to export and convert your bookmarks from Raindrop.io to Obsidian using Pandoc

➡ I am not a professional writer and english isn’t my mother tongue. Some of the screenshots may contain text in other languages Please be nice 🙂 I will describe two use cases Using raindrop for litterature notes when studying a specific topic. Creating a backlog for things to study, watch, read with raindrop. Using raindrop for litterature notes when studying a specific topic. (Example: “Chaos Theory”) My raindrop notes are all stored in the folder “50 - Ra...

“Hair of the dog” refers to solving a problem using the same element that caused it. The expression derives from the old idea that a bite from a rabid dog could be treated by stuffing the wound with fur from the dog that bit you. The same concept, which the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates termed […]

Level 1: NOT BUSY My schedule is wide open. I can choose infinite paths. Zero commitments. The weekend. I sleep like a baby. Life is good, but am I living my best life? Level 2: STUFF TO DO I have a few commitments wandering around my brain. They are reasonable, knowable, and not deadline-based. I

If a customer, a colleague or a friend is generous enough to share their feelings, those feelings are what they are. We might disagree with the assumptions that led to those feelings. But acknowled…

Posted on Friday 9 Dec 2022. 770 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

Difficult tasks can lead to build-up of a signalling molecule in the brain, triggering fatigue.

Put this one next to Dunning Kruger, which shows that people of low ability traditionally overrate how talented they are. The Massie Effect is the tendency of people who support good causes to beli…

Is good advice counterintuitive? Or is it something you already know? Oddly enough, the answer to both may be "No."

In a competition between someone who knows the most and someone who is willing to learn the most, the edge usually goes to the curious and empathic professional, not the one who is simply protectin…

Why carrying heavy feels harder than lifting heavy, why you need to work on both, and how you can incorporate heavy carrying into your workouts.

One of the most difficult existential questions is why bad things happen to good people, especially if there’s a just, benevolent force at the helm of the universe. Seneca, an ancient Stoic philosopher, offers an answer that invites us to consider ourselves as athletes and warriors. He first observes that the “part of each man […]

This is version 2 of my take on recording a year’s worth of Plus Minus Next weekly reviews in a plain text app like Obsidian or iA Writer. Changes:Plus Minus Next now have their own pages, for viewing backlinksTip: use tags to identify Plus, Minus, or Next items in your interstitial journaling entriesThe download consists of a series of files in a folder. Be aware this is not a complete Obsidian vault: it's designed to be copied into your existing vault.You'll see that the weekly review page is essentially a simple list, as my approach is to stay away from app-specific plugins and features when a simple, more universal solution will do.There’s a different icon next to each month, chosen to reflect the seasons of the southern hemisphere. You may like to change them to suit your tastes or part of the world, or just delete them.Screenshot of Plus Minus Next page, showing Outline pane on the rightThe advantage of the icons goes beyond looking pretty: in the outline pane it’s easy to see which week numbers belong to which month, and which weeks cross from one month to another.If you’re new to Obsidian and would like to learn how to set up your notes from scratch, check out Nicole van der Hoeven’s getting started video.

More companies have been asking their employees to return to the office after a long, pandemic-induced period of working from home. One change this transition brings is not being able to access needed personal items from your household’s ample stock of supplies; you have to import all the things you like to have on hand […]

The problem with winning all the marbles is that the game is then over. And owning all the marbles is not really worth the effort if it means no one else has a chance going forward. And quick money…

This year I worked on fascinating projects in energy, media and health* at Magnetic, and learned many learnings.

Most leadership advice says the same thing: to be a good leader, you need to be generous, humble, and authentic. My guest, professor of organizational behavior Jeffrey Pfeffer, would say that kind of advice may make us feel good and represent the world as we’d like it to be, but it doesn’t actually work in […]

A coach talks to you, a mentor talks with you, and a sponsor talks about you. Each can play a valuable role in your career growth.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts"

It’s the age-old question. What boosts creativity? What’s the best way to get in the zone? Hint: It’s not drugs and booze (although it might increase how

When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]

Hurry, sure. We need to hurry. Hurry puts it up on our priority list. Hurry gives us urgency and focus. But rushing is something that leads to errors and then apologies. “I’m sorry, I r…

“I need your John Hancock.” “He’s the prodigal son of our family.” “That job was like working in the seventh layer of hell.” “He has a Willy Loman-esque resignation about him.” “We’re navigating between Scylla and Charybdis here.” Anybody with the literacy of an eighth-grader could read those sentences. Heck, a third-grader could read those […]

Earlier this week I've been reading a brilliant post Writing Down What I Do — In Obsidian from Chris...