Betterment

AI doesn’t have to make slop—it can help you do the best work of your life

It’s possible to consider the next event in our lives as something the world is trying to teach us. But it might be even more effective to realize that, whenever we choose, we can learn somet…

Visitors to your new bookstore are likely to have a phone in their pockets–they could buy a book from the competition without even walking into the shop. And diners at your funky restaurant h…

If you have ever met me in person, you know that when you share an idea with me, I simplify it to its core and reflect it back to you, focusing on its essential parts. I dissect each statement for precision. “What do you mean by this word?” I have two decades of experience working … Continue reading Thinking Clearly

The 1996 Apple Network Server was Apple's first true Unix-through-and-through server (the Apple Workgroup Server 95, actually a Quadra 950...

Organizations and brands can choose their quadrant. It’s tempting to want the best of all four, but it’s going to take effort and focus. All of these terms are relative choices, not abs…

In most organizations, contradictions are treated as problems to be fixed. But what if they’re actually the point?

If someone with less skill and less dedication than you took over your job, could they degrade the quality of your work? It’s not difficult to make a list of twenty things that could be done …

If there was a website you could visit to find out what the future held, how often would you visit it? We do that with the weather, sometimes daily. People are drawn to breaking news and social med…

There was a delightfully odd moment during a recent Oklahoma State game. A fan named Trent Eaton made his way to an empty section of the stands and

It’s difficult to spend the entire day working on outcomes. Sooner or later, there are tasks to be done, tasks we believe will get us to the outcome we seek. But it’s easy to spend the …

Research on creativity shows that the people who come up with the best ideas are the ones who come up with the most ideas.

Daily habits can help you thrive or quietly turn into addictions. The difference is how your brain handles cues, routines, and rewards. Three experts explain how to work with your wiring instead of against it.

Two famous authors were chatting at a glamorous party on New York’s Shelter Island – Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame).  Vonnegut tells

It’s quite likely that your favorite TV show wasn’t written by a single person. There’s a room filled with professionals, bouncing ideas back and forth, provoking each other and c…

For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones mean…

In the prior lesson, I gave a brief review of what foundations are, why they matter and how we can strengthen them. One of the things I discussed in that lesson was that, because foundations are unavoidable, the quality of your life is determined more by your weakest foundations than your strongest. Having lots of […]

It's no longer Ben & Jerry's. Apparently, it's now just Ben's. A few weeks ago, Jerry Greenfield resigned from the legendary ice cream company he

Remember that time your best friend gave a toast at your birthday dinner? Remember how it was perfect? Nostalgic stories, inside jokes, the whole nine.

There’s a profound difference between 3 seemingly similar ways to spend time: sitting around and making things, either alone or with people you want to...

I just reread this 2023 post about a neighborhood Tokyo izakaya (and my related thoughts), spurred by a conversation w/ my friend Andrew about what makes for good work, a good life, and a good society. It dovetails with this podcast conversation between R

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

You need people to turn around and see you

Most of us grow up thinking of anger as a problem. We’re told it’s childish, irrational, and something to repress or rise above. As journalist Sam Parker, author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives, told me on the podcast, that assumption has left a lot of people more anxious and depressed […]

“First, I studied this subject at this university. Then, I entered the corporate world as a consultant for this firm – but my work life felt hollow. I

I make the case for why you should focus on improving your "foundations" in life.

For many of us in the industrialized world, happiness is directly related to how big the container is. Overflowing vs. skimpy. Adequate vs. generous. Overloaded vs. slack to spare. We know that mak…

There’s “regular luck” and “earned luck.” When a stranger dies and leaves you $10,000,000, that’s regular luck. Undeserved, unearned, a bolt out of the blue. Som…

Before modern plumbing, drinking from your local stream was a coin toss with cholera. So civilizations got creative. The Germans brewed beer. The Vikings