When companies with identical resources produce wildly different results, we all want to know the secret.  The recently announced Nobel Prize in

Productivity is the second foundation in my year-long project (and course) to improve the universal elements essential to a good life. As I write this, today is the first day of my month-long productivity challenge, although you’ll probably be reading this in the newsletter around a week later. I didn’t want to publish my month-end […]

There are lights, camera and action, but mostly there’s the unreality of making it fit. Happily ever after, a climax at just the right moment, perfect heroes, tension, resolution and a swelli…

The word “pro” gets appended to a lot of products, and that tends to simply mean some combination of more features and better build quality. But I think there are (at least) 3 aspects to products, both hardware and software, that make them good professional tools. 1. Reliability 2. Predictability

Gergely Orosz on how to stand out in the tough job market circumstances as a junior or senior software developer, and engineering manager.

Woman painting in the storm, Burano, Italy, 1977, Jean Gaumy Hi hi, Here's some art, internet, and ideas for you: I’ve never thought of myself as a person...

Laura Olin’s newsletter of “art, internet, and ideas” is a favorite of mine (subscribe here), and I appreciate

If you’re stuck dealing with a bug that you can’t seem to fix, there’s nothing wrong with getting some white space from it. No harm in that.

Note: The following is an excerpt from The Building of Boyhood: A Manual for Parents, published in 1933. “Some Reasons Why Some Men Are Successful Fathers” By Frank H. Cheley They Believe that being a father is the greatest privilege given any man, and so take their fatherhood seriously. They Believe that all boys are mostly good, […]

My calendar is already full 😱 this is how I included many other side initiatives!

Points aren’t just for games. Points are how we keep score and decide what to do next. Pick your scorekeeping wisely. Too much focus on the score can bend us or break us, pushing us to engage…

The Extraordinary Guests of Charles Babbage's Saturday Night Soirées - Messy Nessy Chic

A few weeks ago, I went on a road trip to Montana with Rod Clark, a photographer friend. On the way back, we stopped in Wells, NV, to get food at Sher-E-Panjab Dhaba, a converted truck stop diner t…

Here in South Florida where Gapingvoid is based, we just survived another Hurricane season.  Watching a few hurricanes nearly miss us naturally led us to

Culture has stability. “The way things are around here.” When we are pushed too far from our norms, life gets stressful. Some of the people in the systems that used to keep things stabl…

Principles have a priority. Isaac Asimov’s three rules of robotics were: First LawA robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second LawA r…

Thoughts on a bruise to the ol’ ego that hurt a little more than I thought it would. But hey, it gives me a chance to talk about gatekeeping.

For the sports fan in me, this has been a bit of a tough week. Two teams I normally like lost in a humiliating fashion. The New York Yankees lost to the L.A. Dodgers in the MLB World Series (4-1), …

It’s a lazy amplifier. “Very” can modify almost any adjective, but it might not deliver our intended message. Putting it in front of a positive like “charming” or &#82…

If worrying about paying the mortgage gets you motivated to lean hard into the next project, don’t be surprised if that sort of fear arises every time you have hard work to do. If your goal i…

Doritos recently sent their chips to space. They developed a special chip that was eaten in gravity-free outer space by real astronauts, and live streamed

Sometimes, marketers, musicians or speakers dig themselves into a solipsistic rabbit hole. They’ve heard their stuff before. They think everyone else has too. So they bury the lede, look for …

Some problems are easy to solve, others are difficult, requiring a lot more labor, willpower, resources and coordination. Some problems have simple solutions, while others are complex in what it ta…

Why are we more likely to get tasks done than to take on new initiatives? Checking something off a to-do list requires far less emotional energy than adding something to the list was in the first p…

Imagine a curve. Amazon is on the left, hyper-efficient, where you can buy a nice handbag made in China for $15. Hermes is on the right, hyper-inefficient

After half a century working there, Joe Holtz, the director of Brooklyn’s Park Slope Co-op, one of the oldest food co-ops in the country is stepping down.

You are someone’s ancestor. Most immediately, you are the ancestor of the you of tomorrow. That’s why we don’t spend every penny in our bank account, why we put leftovers in the f…

There’s a hidden story hanging over all of our heads, subtly influencing everything we do, say, and think. Think about it – what brings people to their

How often do we assume that popular things are good, and that good things become popular? If your work doesn’t catch on, does that mean it wasn’t good? In almost every field, people wit…