Betterment

When you welcome a child into the world, folks often tell you: “Savor this time. The days are long, but the years are short!” This is certainly sage and accurate counsel. There are moments as a parent when you can’t believe how quickly your kids are growing up.  Yet, the fact that a culture of […]

The empty part of the drawer is what makes it a useful tool. Same goes for a filing cabinet, a toolbox and a calendar. Slack is underrated.

I’ve recently restructured my Home note in Obsidian using some dataview queries as a result of doing the Linking Your Thinking workshop.

A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works…

Posted on Friday 23 Jun 2023. 320 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.

The wrong question is, “our project isn’t catching on, how do we promote it better?” The right question is a little more nuanced and far more important, “We’re seeking…

AI is the big new thing these days. New, new, it’s all so new. Except when it isn’t. For example, here’s an article in the Washington Post about

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of

As Justin Dauer contends in this excerpt from his latest book, In Fulfillment: A Designer’s Journey, being willing to evolve is the hallmark of a good designer.

Treasure it when you find it. Offer it when you can. One of the greatest joys of being an author is the other authors. The game theory would indicate that authors are competitors–there are a …

I love toe socks and I think you should too

Starting to explore what a true "static micro blog" might look like.

Imagine you’re a British RAF pilot who has just been shot down and captured by the Germans behind enemy lines. As soon as you arrive at the POW camp, you

I turned 40 last December.  No, I haven’t had a midlife crisis.  But that number did cause me to self-reflect.  How did the first 20 years of adulthood go? What can I do to make the next 20 years great? Around that same time, I happened to watch a documentary about one of my childhood […]

Culture seeks shortcuts. The oldest shortcut is: “Friend or foe?” If we know the answer to that, a whole bunch of time gets saved, and fear is reduced as well. The labeling goes beyond …

Earlier I critiqued the five-minutes-per-day approach to learning. Now let's look at where the slow and patient approach can actually work.

The first few moves of a chess game give the player almost unlimited freedom. There are countless legal moves, and nothing to constrain the choices that a player makes among them. But as we add lev…

How do you stand out at the individual level in a world where everybody is trained to dress the same, get the same qualifications, read the same books,

In the pre-media world, we bumped into fables, or news from across the village, but mostly, our role models and experiences were based on reality. Now, when it’s not unusual to spend eight ho…

We often see problems through the lens that we’re used to using. The banker sees a solution around money, the activist might see an opportunity for social justice. The technologist figures th…

Have you ever had one of those strange dreams, where you're, say, in an airport, trying to catch your plane, but before you can catch your plane, you

Perhaps this is what your team needs from you: Agreeableness is not the same as agreeing. In fact, they have little in common. Finding someone who’s only job is to agree with everything that …

Every driver benefits from good brakes. It makes driving safer. Only a few skilled drivers benefit from better acceleration. Our habit is to compare top speed, horsepower, short-term returns and st…

That’s great news. The thing you need, the road ahead, the element that will transform your project–it appears to be inconvenient. That’s terrific, because it means that most othe…

While it’s likely that you own a bike, you probably don’t have a front-wheel recumbent bicycle in your garage. Even though it’s more efficient, more comfortable and often faster. …

The image above is a redraw of a slide the research psychologist, Gary Klein, once showed to an audience. Basically, a company that wants to get better at

Is patience a vice or a virtue in learning? Some reflections on whether minimal habits are sufficient for mastery.

We can tell from the words. “I’m just doing my job.” “Will this be on the test?” “Don’t blame me.” “It’s what everyone else is wearing.&#…