Betterment

How to read harder books (and how to not get fooled by bad ones).

It’s useful and satisfying to have people go along with your wishes and your taste. But hoping that they’ll be delighted to do so and thank you for pointing out their previous errors mi…

Moore’s Law was stated 60 years ago, but it only became a law once its predictions came true. The reason that your laptop doesn’t cost as much as your house is that computer chips get r…

Adam Gustine articulates the value of an ordinary life doing ordinary work in an ordinary place.

If your toaster isn’t working, this is the first place to start. A combination of an easy first step and also the likelihood that it’s the problem. The troubleshooting for things not wo…

To quote the great Steve Wozniak, “Actual Intelligence.” The kind we’re born with and can develop if we choose. It’s worth more now than ever before. Alas, it’s rarely…

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” Aaron Levie, CEO, Box …

Not, “what do you think you can get?” Not, “what you’d be willing to live with…” Instead: If you were willing to be on the hook for the responsibility (if it wor…

AI is great when it extends your brain. It gets dangerous when it quietly replaces the part that was supposed to think.

Pick an ownable market.

For over ten millennia of the farming era, most folks saw themselves as tightly tied to small groups that lived in a largely alien and hostile world, under the thumb of empires and elites selected by tradition and power, elites not embarrassed by their privilege, interested in the general welfare, nor open to persuasion by argument.

Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.

In this post, I explain why discovery, OKRs, and AI often fail to improve struggling product organizations. Drawing from real coaching experience, I break down why delivery is usually the true bottleneck—and why fixing your foundations comes before strategy, outcomes, or AI transformation.

How to turn a dashboard into a story your team actually believes in

Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog. This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I …

We create a job whenever someone with the authority to hire decides the value created is greater than the wages paid. In my lifetime, we’ve invented 7 billion or more jobs, which is great new…

You’re flying over Mount Rainier and a hole opens up in the bottom of your airplane. In that moment, you think hard about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what matters. My…

Steve Yegge’s article about programmer burnout (“The AI Vampire”) along with Margaret Storey’s article about Cognitive Debt started an ongoing conversation

Introduction Every organisation is sitting on a gold mine it cannot see. The meetings that shape decisions, the workarounds that keep systems running, the judgment calls that experienced people make without being able to explain them, the hard-won lessons from projects that succeeded or failed for reasons nobody wrote down: this is organisational knowledge, and most organisations are losing it faster than they can create it. The challenge is not new. What is new in 2026 is the gap between how mu

Another unique German word. Umfunktionierung. Functional transformation. Most of us take the tools we’re given and use them as instructed. We follow the manual. We color inside the lines. We …

I'm like most people when it comes to reading and note-taking.

At 2:30 in the morning, the night clerk at the hotel is a great help if you’ve locked yourself out of your room. But if you want to complain about the hours of the gym, the hotel’s envi…

Professionals take their work seriously. Hobbyists can take it personally. We arrive and make a promise. We do it on behalf of the client, and that promise has little to do with what we might want …

Weeknotes 388 - Thoughts triggered by being in a bubble in Athens, making sense of reality, community, and genuine collaboration in times of AI. And of course, lots of captures from last week’s news on physical AI and beyond.

If we're so rich, why is everyone miserable?

On a beautiful Sunday in Central Park, you’ll see thousands of people out for a jog. Each person has exactly the right running style–and none of those styles are the same. Each is weari…

An Argument into the Agora