Betterment

Marshall Goldsmith started his career out as a business school professor but ended up as one of the world’s top executive coaches. In Episode 142 of the

Recently, we listened to Marshall Goldsmith's interview on The Knowledge Project, Episode #142. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top executive coaches in

Truth, relevance, usefulness, beauty, simplicity: the 5 aspects of an idea.

Someone said that to me the other day and it was heartbreaking. The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed. Just about everythin…

That’s what it said on the side of the tractor-trailer on the highway. Since 1924, they’re almost 100 years old. But it’s unlikely that it’s everyone’s favorite. Being…

I have learned a lot about influencing the way people think about APIs. I am not always successful in influencing people the way I desire, but I have had a significant amount of success in shaping the way people do APIs across a number of industries, government agencies, and enterprise organizations. One of the more influential tactics I have in my toolbox involves rarely directly telling people to do things, and opting to indirectly shape how people think through telling stories and planting seeds over time across an increasingly number of relevant channels they are tuned into. You see, most people prefer believing that something was their own idea. You can see an example of this in the fact that many folks believe they are “self-taught”, when in reality, none of us are self-taught, and we all depend on learning, borrowing, and often stealing from other people’s work and making it our own.

Big companies act like big companies. We don’t take them seriously when they say they care, because there is no “they.” When they send a holiday card or an email, we don’t r…

Without a doubt, the world has become more connected, noisier and more complex. But along the way, we’re still applying our instincts from a century ago, from a planet of villages and differe…

In the beloved sitcom, The Office, the main character Michael Scott drives his car into a lake. Why? Because he followed his GPS. He focused on the map.

Voter registration ends today in most states. That means the beloved American tradition of the “I voted” sticker is right around the corner. This simple

I’m not sure we have a common word for this. “Yes” can mean, “yes, I’m prepared to do the minimum” or it could mean, “yes, this commitment is something I w…

Almost twenty million self-help books were sold last year. But the popularity of self-help literature is hardly a modern phenomenon. Some of the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers arguably fall into the personal development category. So do pieces of literature that were written every century after their time. In a way, this can […]

Satisfaction is often driven by the story we tell ourselves. How does this rank compared to what I expected? Compared to what I used to have? Compared to the person sitting next to me? The richest …

“Don’t be a quitter!” “Quitters never win, and winners never quit!”   These maxims encapsulate our usual attitude towards quitting, which is to see it as a bad thing, a weakness, a character defect. We celebrate those who stick with things, who have grit. But my guest would say that quit and grit are just two sides of the same coin, and that quitting is a […]

The optic nerve dominates. It’s piped directly into our brains and uses a lot of processing power to help us discern the world through vision. As a result, it’s louder than our other se…

You might want to make something that a lot of people want a little… Or you could make something that a few people want a lot. It’s usually neither. It’s rarely (very rarely) both…

If, every time there’s a dish in the sink, you load and run the dishwasher and scrub the entire kitchen, you’re never going to get anything else done. On the other hand, if you wait unt…

Understand what you know and what you don’t

What is the best approach to follow when dealing with a critical incident in production?

This common question no longer means anything. Every TV show is on. All the time. Our record collection streams every record ever recorded. And our readers can find and display just about any book …

What do the dishwashers eat for lunch? What’s the user experience of accounts payable for that big tech company? How does the head of sales treat the receptionist? If it’s good enough f…

Posted on Tuesday 4 Oct 2022. 688 words, no links. By Matt Webb.

The advertising industry lost a real titan recently. Dan Wieden, the co-founder of Wieden And Kennedy, passed away at the age of 77. W+K is arguably the

Event-Driven by Oskar Dudycz