There’s a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better. When we say even better, we lock in a foundation — we’re affirming that s…

“Fight Club” (1999), starring Ed Norton (as “The Narrator”) and Brad Pitt (as “Tyler Durden”) is considered one of the best movies of its decade. A real

Engineers, scientists, and most of all, businesses are looking for the right answer. It’s such a common quest that we take it for granted, but it’s new, and it continues to cause stress…

Three of my friends got hacked this week. You get an ecard and click. It asks you to log in to your email. Boom, done. It hacks your email account, steals all of your contacts and then sends itself…

Not only are AIs far more agreeable than humans when advising on interpersonal matters, but users also prefer the sycophantic models.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told

You know the old cliché about the moon and the stars?  That if you shoot for the moon and miss, it’s all well and good because you’ll still land among the

The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn’t at anyone else’s door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it wa…

There’s a great novel that came out in 1949, “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles. It’s about a married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, two wealthy but

Explore the delirious rantings of Frederick Vanbrabant. A blog focused on the intersection of Enterprise Architecture, product, and business strategy.

Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages. But no writer knows all the words. That’s the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie–between the universal letters …

Five evidence-based strategies that don't require becoming a LinkedIn influencer

In the 1970s, the late academic, Thomas McGovern who was well known in environmental circles at the time proposed a nice explanation for why the Norse

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even mak…

Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts. Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s…

It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are setti…

We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re …

If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing sessio…

If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than…

Withdraw, endure, or laugh? The ancients have some advice about facing disillusionment.

The internet has stopped being a place we visit — it’s now an environment we inhabit.

Robert Trivers died last week, perhaps the greatest evolutionary biologist of the last century. Though not as famous as his colleague, Richard Dawkins, he

If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at…

Ten years ago, I published ​Deep Work​. It was my second mainstream hardcover idea book. The previous title, ​So Good They Can’t Ignore You​, hadn’t ... Read more

It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much. Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw. After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate,…

You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef with…

"AI isn't lightening workloads," The Wall Street Journal reported last week. "It's making them more intense." Well, yes. This is, in fact, how "workload" works under capitalism: labor is perpetually squeezed to do more, to generate more surplus value, to create more profit for the boss. Technological advancements -- that's

April 13, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth. An oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13. “Houston, we've had a problem.” It could have been the end. It wasn't.

On Monday, I’ll be opening registration for my new course, Everyday Energy. The course is a three-month program designed to help you build practices into your life that promote greater vitality—and productivity. In case you missed it, I’ve written a brief essay series discussing our human energy crisis, the biological roots of our exhaustion and […]