Betterment

There’s one best, sure-fire way to keep your house neat and tidy: Regularly invite people over to it. Whenever you’re anticipating a visit from guests, finding the motivation to get your place in order ceases to be a problem. Toilet paper rolls move from the floor to the holder; shipping boxes get taken to the […]

New hires can earn higher salaries, which could pay off to switch jobs if you find out a coworker makes more money than you.

Piano tuners have a vital job… and very few pianists do that work themselves. Who maintains your tools? Perhaps it’s a computer with all the software that goes with it. Do you have a wo…

Outsized rewards go to people who figure out how to master a skill or a point of view, and then commit to doing it again and again. This insight helps us with two things: if you want a certain kind…

Thinkism is the fallacy that problems can be solved by greater intelligence alone. Thinkism is a fallacy that is often promoted by smart guys who like to think. In their own heads, they think their own success is due to

In most pyramids, the top gets all the attention, but it’s the foundation that truly matters. Marketing is no exception. The base of the pyramid, the most important layer, is INTENTION. What …

If you’re considering putting an unmarked key into a drawer filled with keys, you’re better off simply throwing it out instead. Not only won’t you be able to find that unmarked ke…

It’s hard not to open a book or scan a news site without hearing about burnout. Workers are burned out. Parents are burned out. Everyone is burned out. As the word denotes, and it’s popularly conceived, burnout is a function of being overextended, overwhelmed, and overtaxed. It’s a function of too much. Too much work. […]

A collection of Jack’s London’s quotes. Read a few when you’re feeling restless and sick of drifting through life.

Modern agile practices in software development are usually a synonym with well-defined chunks of work over a specific timeline, usually a 2-week sprint. What this implies is that by having a fixed timeline to work on, it also limits the amount of work that a team can deliver in that fixed period of time. So, it becomes imperative that people work on what can deliver the most impact. However, knowing how to choose exactly what to work on can be a bit of a tricky question that can arise when using these types of practices. Immediately, several questions can arise such as:

It’s not the same as being rich. Rich is always relative. Compared to your great-grandparents, we’re impossibly, supernaturally rich. We have access to information and technology that w…

Does it feel like the world is out to get you? Does it seem like everyone you know is an a-hole? Does it feel like your life is going nowhere and that you’ll always be a loser? If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above questions, then you might be a miserable […]

Who am I to walk up to someone at a party and introduce myself? Who are you to start a new project? Who are they to give a talk on the main stage? Don’t raise your hand–someone else mig…

Emotional intelligence develops with a clear understanding of our own emotions. Our team of experts recommends books that can teach you the basics.

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.” — Christopher Morley

Resistance often shows up insisting that it can predict the future. The voice in our head, the one that knows everything, also knows that you will be rejected, that the work will be misunderstood, …

Charisma - personal magnetism - is something that can be learned. Part one in our series is learning charismatic presence.

Not your metaphorical voice. I mean your actual voice. It’s pretty clear to me that our speaking voice is not the result of the inevitable physical evolution of our vocal cords. It’s so…

Wandering around in a digital swamp is a pretty common way to spend an hour these days. Alas, most of us would never consider doing this in a forest. Walking over to a tree because it looked sort o…

I was sitting in a friend’s study the other day, and noticed that he had hundreds of books I’d never read. Each was written, perhaps over the course of a year (or a decade), by a smart,…

When do we get better through direct practice? A deep dive into the research and its practical implications.

What do you own?What are you really good at?What do you enjoy? Engaging with the marketplace requires creating value for people who have a choice. And deciding what to offer your customers is your …

Big company CEOs get paid ridiculous amounts of money, but the good ones also do something that most of us avoid. They make decisions. In fact, that’s pretty much the core of the job. Whether…

The curse of knowledge is all about not remembering what you know, combined with not understanding what your audience knows, leading to confusion.

Cho explains how an injury on set gave him a new outlook, and how he’s getting his creativity back to basics.

Some products, some services, some experiences are just right. It’s hard to know how to make them simpler, more beautiful or more useful…

Since publishing my second book, Staff Engineer, I’ve had more folks popping up for publishing advice. I’ve written a few times about my experience writing books in Self-publishing Staff Engineer (2021) and What I learned writing a book (2019), but neither directly confronts the two questions that folks keep asking, “Should I write a book?” and “How do I publish a book?”

At work, the Staff engineering team has a monthly meeting. The agenda varies but most recently we talked about a common theme: how do you find career progression after reaching your organization’s terminal level?

If your roof is leaking, the water in the basement will gradually move up until you’ve got a full-blown flood. And for most humans, for twenty years, each day we get a little taller. It&#8217…

Tug boats don’t usually tug. They push. That’s because pushing is more mechanically efficient than pulling. When we pull, there’s tension and slack in the ropes, and the attachmen…