Betterment

It took me thirty years to populate the bookshelf that’s behind me in most of my videos. Most of us don’t have the time or patience to do that. At the same time, the wonky computer-gene…

It’s possible you use social media to grow your business. Or to enhance your career. Or maybe it’s to find delight and joy. When you add up all the tikking, tokking, tweeting and clicki…

A brief explanation of my pessimism about efforts to radically improve education.

If you’re not sure of the difference, you’re probably just doing your job. Perhaps, if you’re fortunate, your job is in sync with your work. But most of the time, our work is some…

Even if you’re not applying, this thought experiment gives a glimpse into how the world is about to be rewired. The top 10 most selective colleges in the US admit about 5% of those who apply.…

Ed-Tech Criticism. AI Refusal.

Peter Mommsen articulates the real good that small magazines can accomplish.

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.