Growing our impact or profit usually involves maximizing something that’s valuable. And things that are valuable are often scarce. Finding the one thing that is at the heart of your value/sca…
People tend to do one of two things: not talktalk Both are a problem. If we’re facing an important issue at work, at school or in our community, our instinct is to let others who are better i…
Sunday Firesides: Develop a Metabolically Flexible Psyche
In the realm of physiology, being “metabolically flexible” means that your body can use whatever fuel is available to meet its energy demands. It can readily switch between burning carbohydrates or burning fat (whether that’s fat you ingest or fat already stored in your cells). While a metabolically inflexible individual gets cranky and lethargic if […]
Podcast #827: Where You Should Live When You Could Live Anywhere
When we think about people who can live anywhere, we tend to think about corporate-employed remote workers and online entrepreneurs. But many other kinds of professionals, from teachers to doctors, could hypothetically find a job anywhere, and thus live anywhere they’d like. If you’re what my guest Melody Warnick calls an “anywhereist” and have seriously […]
The math is simple: many people do less than they should. They might be selfish, but it’s likely that they’re struggling with a lack of resources or a story of insufficiency. Either way…
Both The Shawshank Redemption and The Big Lebowski bombed. If “bombed” means that during the first few weeks, no one went to a theater to see them. Since then, tens of millions of peopl…
They dance with each other. If expectations are too low, you don’t get the gig, and you’ll never have a chance to engage with a customer. But if they’re too high, surprise and rem…
Plastic was inevitable. It took hundreds of years to perfect, but we built a system based on profit, convenience, productivity and markets. Markets are extremely good at sniffing out problems that …
Today marks the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II. It’s a milestone that feels both distant in time, and not that long ago. There are still those living among us who experienced the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Normandy, and the celebration of V-J Day firsthand. But each year, they […]
How to rewrite a press release: a step-by-step guide
As a teaching fellow in grad school I helped undergrads improve their expository writing. Some were engineers, and I invited them to think about writing and editing prose in the same ways they thou…
Look around the rooftops of many cities and you’ll see wooden water towers. New York has thousands of them. The reason is simple and often overlooked: In the morning, when every resident of t…
Oppositional energy is easy to create and spread. Once you pick a ‘they’, then it’s simply a matter of doing the opposite of whatever ‘they’ recommend. It’s a la…
It doesn’t matter that it’s not the Super Bowl or the World Cup. For this twelve-year old, tomorrow’s game is the big game, the biggest ever, and the emotional stakes are just as …
So many choices. So many sorts of metrics, critics and measures. Perhaps it makes sense to count things where the counting tells us how to do better next time. And to count things that let us know …
Adverts and search engines have massively impacted the ways in which we read online. I don’t just mean how we find things to read, but impacts on how we read and the quality of reading online…
Evaluate how much trust you have in a claim as you process the information. Introducing the Lindy Filter and the Zettelkasten Method Evidence Scale as tools to do this. Your future self will thank you for better backed statements.
When we sing in the shower, we hardly expect applause. In fact, that would be awfully weird. But online, when just about anyone might be clicking, watching or sharing, it’s disappointing to p…
Grey thinking works. Reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers and no solutions without second-order consequences.
Supercharge your learning and become smarter by using the Feynman Technique. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.