How to Avoid Outrage Fatigue and Tune In without Burning Out
Outrage fatigue can wear us down—but we can take care of ourselves in an onslaught of overwhelming news.
4 things entrepreneurial couples can teach every cofounder
Romantic couples and business partnerships share more similarities than you think.
My note-taking system gives me constant content ideas
I create a lot but never run out of ideas. Part of my secret is the note-taking system I use.
Ed Yong on Breaking Down and Putting Yourself Back Together
My favorite presentation at XOXO this year was Ed Yong’s talk about the pandemic, journalism, his work over the past four years, and the personal toll that all those things took on him. I just watched the entire thing again, riveted the whole time
Muscling your way through
When there’s an overwhelming amount of incoming, it’s possible to bear down and simply get through it. 200 emails because of a product launch. A project goes viral and there are a lot o…
Clarity about the benefits
Work on climate problems is actually about efficiency. It’s easier and cheaper to avoid sloppiness and side effects than it is to clean the mess up later. And energy sources that don’t …
The Last Word On Nothing | Be Like This Tree
So you wanna de-bog yourself
What I found in the mire
The NEAT Effect: How Small Movements Can Lead to Big Weight Loss
If you’re looking to lose some weight this year, you’ve likely made plans to reduce your calories and hit the gym hard. While calorie reduction and physical exercise are essential components of weight loss, there’s another crucial factor that often gets overlooked: non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT. NEAT is all the calories you burn daily […]
The Theseus Paradox
It’s called the Theseus Paradox. According to Plutarch, there’s an Ancient Greek story about a 30-oar ship belonging to King Theseus, which by standards
A small note-taking change
A few thoughts on the mechanical pencil I recently switched to.
Develop Empathy with your Future Self
Align everything that you do so that it is an act of service to your future self.
To be in charge
Every system, every bureaucracy and every organization creates boundaries. Sooner or later, we say, “I’d love to fix this, but I’m not in charge of that.” Perhaps, though, w…
Driving to the airport
Imagine we wanted to estimate how long it would take to drive to the airport. You might see that it’s 50km to the airport and that your car can drive at 100km/hour. Therefore it will take 30 minutes, right?
You’re missing your near misses
FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport – NPR, Jan 30, 2025 The amount of attention an incident gets is proportional to the severity of the incident: the greater the impact to the organizat…
Going into battle despite great odds
People love that shit!
The Next Generation of SaaS
“Top 6 Predictions for 2025”
You will find your people
Issue #256: the United States of Breakfast, midlife crises, and having fun
Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools | Alex Tiniuc
Lesson Four: How Life of Focus Works - Scott H Young
On Monday, Cal Newport and I are reopening Life of Focus for a new session. Before we do that, I’d like to take this chance to explain how Life of Focus works—since it is a little different from what most people have come to expect from online courses—and share how I think about designing courses […]
Expertise and credentials
In the ideal world, credentials would be awarded to all experts, and withdrawn from all charlatans. But they don’t always line up as neatly as that. An expert is someone who can keep a promis…
From DEI to dei
It’s been a busy week for our new President, to put it mildly. The thing that’s gotten the most attention is his Executive Order putting an immediate end
Loss is the Only Constant
The losses keep coming. The lives lost in the DCA plane crash, entire communities lost in the LA fires, careers lost from new policy shifts. Words feel
Analysis = Facts + Interpretation
If you fail to show us the facts, it’s difficult to accept your analysis. While it’s tempting to simply share an interpretation of what’s happening, credibility and persuasion are…
Lesson Three: Why You Can’t Focus - Scott H Young
Focus is hard. And in the years since I’ve started writing, it has gotten harder. Diagnoses of ADHD (including self-diagnoses) have skyrocketed. While it’s likely that some of this is due to a lessening of stigma around mental health issues revealing what was already there, anecdotally, it appears that people are having a much harder […]
What sort of progress?
Nothing stays still. Relative to the rest of the world, even something that’s not moving is changing. It’s tempting to talk about not making fast enough progress. But it’s far mor…
Organizing for urgent
There are many ways to prioritize our time and focus, but the easiest and most vivid way is to do the urgent things first. If we wait until a house plant is sick before we take care of it, though, …
Getting clear about brand value
Consulting firms rank brands on value. Marketers promise to increase it. But brand value has little to do with whether a company is famous or even profitable. The accurate measure of brand value is…
"Your Job Here is to Realign the Stargate"
Ideally, on Monday mornings, I've got an essay for you. (Schedule of events here at Second Breakfast: Monday’s newsletter: essay, most of it for paid subscribers; Friday’s: the week’s news, yay! the news!, for everyone.)
Although the word “essay” comes from the French essayer (to try), I
Honesty about better
“I don’t want to learn to be better,” is something we rarely admit. We don’t say: I don’t want to learn statistics, even though it will dramatically improve my decisio…