Betterment

I was asked recently what things I’d look at to determine if a team or group is improving and there are three main areas. In all three cases, none of these prove that improvement is happening. What they do provide is a place to me to start asking questions so that I can discover more.

In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first ... Read more

What do New York Mayor, Eric Adams, and Sean Combs aka Puff Diddy have in common? They’ve allegedly fallen into what we call “The Croesus Trap.” Whatever

Once an organization figures out a successful model, it begins to grow. And when it grows, it needs more staff. And they often hire for specific tasks and the skills that go with them. They need a …

Posted on Friday 27 Sep 2024. 748 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.

Where I explore the concept of “generalist syndrome,” in which individuals with a wide range of skills may unknowingly limit themselves by relying on their own capabilities instead of considering alternative, potentially more effective solutions.

Earlier today I saw a post from someone who has had their iPhone stop charging at 80% for the past year and they didn’t see much, if any difference in battery health than their coworkers who didn’t do anything, and let the iPhone do its “optimized charging” over

One of the hardest questions in business is how to scale.  The great startup VC, Paul Graham, talks about this in one of his essays, “Founder Mode”. As

…are still consequences. We’re all participants in the systems around us, and complicit in their consequences even if we didn’t intend them. First, we need to see the systems, and…

A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.

The big news in remote working this month was the memo Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, sent out last week mandating that all employees return to the office five

There is always room for someone who really knows their way around an industry, a technology or a problem. That’s what agents, agencies and organizers do. The hard part isn’t in finding…

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” We believe it. Fall is our favorite time of the year. It’s a season where things are dying and transitioning into dormancy. But there’s also a last gasp of physical and psychic energy in the air. It’s like […]

Talk up how much you’re balancing at any given time, and how seamlessly that translates to being successful in a career.

You know what they say, your glass is either half empty or half full. In a similar way, starting a new life completely is either having nothing, or it’s a […] More

Build Your Own Business. Experience True Freedom.

John Waters' rollicking commencement speech at The Rhode Island School of Design offered up some good one-liners and a few pearls of wisdom, though phrased, quite naturally, in an irreverent way. Ready for some sage advice on what really counts as wealth?

According to Canva's co-founder and chief product officer, it's critical to balance developers' needs and core product values.

It might only cost $2 in the vending machine, but that can of soda is a complicated battery. It stores the energy of the machines that were used to mine the bauxite, the ship that brought the ore t…

Procrastination I recently decided to start a new side-project. It’s an app for android. I often have ideas for handy little apps — but I only ever shipped a few. Why is that?\nRight after an idea emerges, I immediately start to think about architecture and technical details.\nI will definitely need a database… No self-hosting. I definitely need to host that in the cloud. Maybe on AWS or Azure? Maybe some server-less approach? What kind of databases does AWS provide? … I then waste at least two weeks drilling down the AWS documentation and researching several irrelevant topics like global secondary index or DynamoDB sort keys. Sounds familiar? It usually ends with:\n

Behind the Yellow Tape: Investigating Tech Mishaps

Professional woodworkers rarely have to be reminded to sharpen their tools. Of course they know this. The rest of us, on the other hand, regularly use digital tools we don’t understand, don&#…

In the space of just a few years, I changed my diet, started exercising, began using a productivity system, read several books per month, joined Toastmasters, wrote a journal regularly, began waking up early, tried mediation and much more.

A poignant definition of civilization is all the conveniences, courtesies, standards, insulation and tools that we hardly notice now but that we would miss if they were gone.

The title of this piece is basically the subtext of a growing trend reported in a recent WSJ article, “America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined

using the jorge static site generator to pack a blog anthology as an epub file.

Alright, fellow freelancers, gather ‘round. Today, we’re diving deep into the cesspool of client interactions that make us question our…

You must escape the shallow joy of more

Drowning is devastating, a tragic and painful way to go. So much so that feeling like we’re drowning is a trigger, an overwhelming emotion that causes us to grasp, struggle and leave our best…