For years, I’ve been using this picture of Neil Armstrong when I tell the story of meeting him and hearing his talk at one of his last public appearances: I wasn’t there when this photo…

The Cult of Done Manifesto is a special document. Written from bed with Kio Stark in our first few months of dating. It was one of those…

The Builders' Library gathers the expertise of Amazon's most experience builders in one place. One article that really got me thinking was Colm MacCárthaigh's "Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee" which is about an anti-fragility pattern that he developed for building simple, more robust, and cost-effective systems.

We’re in Italy this week for a client engagement. Walking around the piazza at the center of town has us thinking surely this must be the happiest nation

That’s the avoidable one and the one that usually causes the real trouble. When the first mistake flusters us, breaks our rhythm or messes with our confidence, we’re far more likely to …

My new short LinkedIn class on project management just launched, and I’ll be discussing it live today with Amanda Ruud … we’ll be there if you want to bring your questions. Sooner…

Apple didn’t succeed because of the way Steve Jobs dressed. Just like SBF’s hair didn’t put him in jail. We can look at the outré behavior of various Silicon Valley overlords and …

Make It New

Here are the people who have most greatly influenced my thoughts on learning.

It might feel like an endless slog now, but when the innovation appears, people won’t remember how long it took to get here. Often, we assume that today’s snapshot is actually the entir…

The Third Attractor, The Third Horizon, and the Third Reality

They say one does their best work when they’re actually not working, but in a state of play, or as the clever folk like to call it, “Flow.” According to

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise projects (or your life, or anything else)

“I don’t want to send this pitch to a list of every single podcaster in the world, but we have to get the word out.” “I don’t want to send an email to every one of our…

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is known as one of the greatest movies of all time. It’s usually found in most serious film critics’ top-ten lists. Three

Many moths are attracted to light. That works fine when it’s a bright moon and an open field, but not so well for the moths if the light was set up as a bug trap. Processionary caterpillars f…

Hibernating animals spend the fall feasting, putting on weight in preparation for the months to come, when sufficient food won’t be available. During the winter, they lay secure in their dens and don’t eat or drink for months, instead subsisting on their stores of fat. It’s a model that has some application to the human […]

The big business news of late is that Sam Bankman-Fried (SBM) was convicted in Federal Court on all seven counts of fraud and faces up to over a century

Players say that mental conditioning was just as important as physical in preparation for the National Women’s Soccer League title.

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise projects (or your life, or anything else)

A few decades ago, Chérie Carter-Scott devised a list of 10 Rules for Being Human, which was published in her 1998 book If Life Is

In Steven Pressfield’s classic The War of Art, he introduces the idea of Resistance. It’s the internal force that keeps us from doing our most important creative work. If an instinct, a…

Mixing up a batch of homemade vegan marshmallow Fluff® is an exercise in patience. For the first nine minutes of the ten minutes it takes in the mixer, not much happens. And then, it transforms int…

“….the rich were kept in power by the connivance of the educated classes, who encouraged the People to vote into office the lickspittle frontmen of the Elite who would make promises they had …

It’s worth the most when it’s the most difficult to find.

Have you ever glanced across a restaurant and seen a couple sitting together in silence? They stared at each other, at their meal, or, most likely, at their phones. This is a sad sight, for staying engaged throughout a dinner date indicates the health of a long-term relationship in two ways. First, it shows that […]

In the late 1990s, Havas, the large marketing multinational bought the independent ad agency, Jordan McGrath in New York. The CEO, Bob Schmetterer gave an

How can you run more effective meetings? One way is to study folks who are masters at running effective meetings, and get paid for it — professional facilitators. Roger Schwarz is one of the world’s leading experts on facilitation. He has a set of what he calls ground rules for

There are people who get paid to play the flute or bassoon. There are far more people who volunteer to participate in a community orchestra. For many, rehearsals or performances are the high points…