Betterment

Ding.

Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool.

As Vivek Ramaswamy warned: “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Even Pope Leo XIV has recently announced

Back in 1971, long before Twitter meltdowns and TikTok swipe fests, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Herbert A. Simon said something that should have been a

How to switch hats and stop solving problems your team should own.

We’re taught to eliminate duplication at all costs. But the wrong abstraction is far more expensive than a little copy-paste. Here’s why.

Manifesto Part 9: Have Fun

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Hint: Coding Isn't One of Them

“We know that as little as 10 minutes of walking can improve your mood, getting that bubble bath with the dopamine, serotonin, endorphins going. Anybody can do that.”

AI is here to help. It shops for us, orders our food, plans our diets, writes our reports, answers our emails, and preps our meetings. It’s becoming the

This is an understandable sentiment. As jobs push people to be automatons and often offer little in the way of respect, it’s easy to quietly quit. But perhaps, they’re not paying you en…

Tactics are tempting. We can lean into them, invest, build our skills and count on results. Strategies are more elusive. And a mismatch between strategy and tactics leads to wasted effort. In this …

There’s a difference between ‘rich’ and ‘richer’. And ‘fit’ and ‘fitter’. The problem with a pre-amp that goes all the way to 11 isn’t th…

More what? Less what? 90 years ago, Bucky Fuller gave his answer. There is a different one now.

Research roles, craft standout applications, and ace interviews

In a huge bag of chips, each individual chip isn’t worth as much as if there’s only a few. On a long vacation, each day might feel less precious than on a short one. This is an invented…

The site gives movies two scores on a scale from 1 to 100: One is from critics, and the other is from typical viewers who are taking the time to chime in. Many movies have virtually the same score …

You have a friend who constantly tells you how awesome you are, how amazing you look, and that you’re the best person ever. Wow. This friend is more

Jony Ive's Philosophy of Design

We expend effort. We create value. It’s easy to get confused about which one we’re going to ultimately be compensated for.

Dan Maloney and I were talking on the podcast about his memories of the old electronics magazines, and how they had some gonzo projects in them. One, a DIY picture phone from the 1980s, was a monst…

It was probably Montesquieu who coined the proto-hacker motto “the best is the mortal enemy of the good”. He was talking about compromises in drafting national constitutions for nascent democracies…

Go to the store, look at the five kinds of mustard on offer, and pick the one that’s best for you. This is not controversial. Go to Amazon and search for wireless headphones. There are more t…

It’s impossible to communicate everything. The map is not the territory, it’s an abstraction, a summary and most of all, a conceptual framework. When we share an idea, we can work to ma…

Once a man was tasked with building a mezzanine bed - seven feet high, handmade from wood, with an angled ladder and boxed shelving beneath it - but with

Ever notice how the most beautiful promises come with fine print? Today’s Effective Altruists and Silicon Valley tech utopians, say: "A perfect society is

There are two ways for an artisan or professional to see the world: Scarcity. This is the idea that if there were fewer photographers, more people would hire me to do wedding pictures. That if the …