Betterment

Our old friend, Rory Sutherland has a piece of advice: “Be good at two things.” A Marine who knows how to fight is good. A Marine who knows how to fight

Explore the complexities of Chinese names and their Hanyu Pinyin transliteration, which can create ambiguity, even for native speakers.

The best way to complain is to make things better. Complaining can be a form of intimacy. It’s a useful way to explain our behavior. And best of all, it gives us a way to communicate as we wo…

Modern marketing culture is designed to amplify our desires. To turn faint wants into desperate needs. As a result, we’re intimately familiar with what we want. And we strive to get it. The p…

In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it. This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, …

Great companies and teams often get stale and then fade away. Here’s what we hear as it happens: “I’m way too important to listen to customers. Send them to the call center.&#8221…

Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer. The shift in labor led to an explosion …

Asymmetrical information creates real problems. And fixing the flow of useful proxies benefits both sides. Cigarette companies knew a great deal about the addictions they were causing and the illne…

A generation ago, the Generals ruled. General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, General Dynamics… they were big, and they had a lot to lose. As a result, people trusted them to show up an…

If it happened to us, our memory of it is a story, our record of it with us at the center. Even if it’s on video, even if other people were there, our narrative and the context and the play b…

Lousy tools are dangerous. They endanger our safety (physical or emotional) and undermine our work. Lousy tools are pretty easy to avoid, because they reveal themselves whenever we use them. Great …

Want to be better with money? Here are ten books + the one-minute summary of what you need to know.

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

Plenty of people have been talking about the rifts between liberals and conservatives and between men and women. But there’s a fault line out there that is just as divisive and may be responsible for more relational estrangement than any other — despite the fact that it remains almost entirely unrecognized and understood: The division […]

Humans are well overdue for a technological revolution – not a profit-driven one like we’re having now, a human-centric one. Sci-fi is wonderful for having your brain run wild. Over the…

A candid post about some of the things that kept me, my employees, and our company from achieving our full potential.

What if there was one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use? While that might sound too good to be true, my guest, Pat Flynn, would say you can find all those benefits in the old-school kettlebell. Pat, […]

Mark Twain noted that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Around 500 BC, Rome got rid of its kings and became a Republic. Ditching

Writing a book is good for you. It clarifies your thinking and it’s generous as well. You might not publish it professionally, but sharing it with people you want to teach and lead is a usefu…

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

A bureaucracy recently asked me to submit a few documents. They were very specific and the person on the phone said that the subject line of the email I sent should be blank. This is really unsettl…

IT people are notoriously bad at explaining technology issues in business terms. So it should be no surprise when the people funding the projects don’t want to spend money on things that sound like gibberish to them. There are real product gaps that they want fixed and they have no time for “cleaning up technical debt” or “doing automation” or “upgrading framework X to version 2”.

Everyone needs more chances, more benefit of the doubt, more opportunity. But what turns a chance into a big break is what we do with it once the chance arrives.

On Thursday, we learned the devastating news: Absolute Bagels had closed. Suddenly and, apparently, for good. A Saturday morning trip up to the bagel shop on the Upper West Side has been a weekly ritual for Kin since we moved here. He'd buy a dozen bagels – a couple for Saturday

Like all good metaphors, it might be practical too. Your ‘shoes’ are the point of greatest leverage. The spot where you have traction and engage with the world most directly. For a free…

If 2023 felt odd then 2024 felt even weirder. My theme was “Frequency” and in 2024 it proved hard to tune into the right frequency.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus is credited with coming up with the theory of atoms (the Greek word for “indivisible”) circa 400 BC. In the end,

That’s the tempting question. How much hustle, hoopla and initiative do we need to get this idea ignited in the marketplace… But the much better question is: How much kindling do we hav…