Betterment

Proverbs from around the world: See that you are wise, but also learn to appear ignorant. (Armenian) If men could foresee the future, they would still behave as they do now. (Russian) Many have suffered for talking; none ever suffered for keeping silent. (Italian) To listen to a lie is harder than to tell it. (Turkish) Not your friend but your enemy will tell you who you are. (Greek) It is not the fault of the post that a blind man cannot see it. (Sanskrit) A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book....

We probably think we use social media as an entertaining distraction. But the deeper drive underlying our urge to keep scrolling is the simple fear of missing out. We ever feel we’re one swipe away from finding ideas that will help advance our careers, inspire our creativity — maybe even allow us to live forever […]

Discover how to gamify your learning process using Obsidian. From flashcards to challenges, learn how to make knowledge acquisition both fun and effective.

The Lean Web Club is my garden of front-end learning. It includes coaching, courses, and coding resources, and right now, I’m running a summer of learning sale. If you sign up today, you get a month of membership for free, plus 30 percent off your next three months. If you sign up for a yearly or lifetime membership, you save even more! Here’s what you get… Coaching Learning web development is hard!

As the old saying goes, “no response is still a response.” And it’s precisely the response Apple CEO, Tim Cook, recently gave to Elon Musk. Cook made a

It’s a pretty simple calculation. How much value per dollar does a freelancer produce for you? What’s the psychic reward for the time you put into your favorite hobby? That machine that…

As Tony Robbins says,“success leaves clues.”  Whenever there is a great accomplishment, we like to examine it, reengineer it, decode it, and learn a

The person you’re working with might not know what you know, might not see what you see. It’s tempting to begin where we are. But it’s more useful to begin where they are.

Human. Alive. Immortal. We think of these as set, binary states. Things you either are or aren’t. You’re either human or nonhuman. Dead or alive. Mortal or immortal. But in truth, these states exist on a continuum, the ends of which you are always moving towards or away from. If humanness is defined by those […]

The alternative to results-oriented thinking is process-oriented thinking. With process-oriented thinking, your focus is on the quality of the decisions that produce the result – the part of the process that you can control, instead of the random variables that you don't control.

Disney is having a bad time of things lately, with some high profile box office flops, or at least, major disappointments. 2023 was the year it really

For thousands of years, and as recently as the 1930s, phrenology was seen as a useful proxy to judge someone’s character. Carefully charting the bumps on someone’s head, along with the …

Near-future science fiction is a fine way to consider our now. Without the reality of today, we can think hard about the tomorrow we’re about to live in. Summer reads are supposed to be a bit…

Since March, I’ve been waking up earlier. Before that time, I’d typically go to bed at 11 p.m. and naturally wake up between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m. Then, for some reason, regardless of what time I went to bed, I started spontaneously waking up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. Consequently, I moved my bedtime earlier, […]

The price of improving structure

When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why ... Read more

The thunderstorm doesn’t know we exist. Rain dances and wishes are ineffective at bringing or preventing a storm, because it isn’t caused by our actions. Metaphorical weather is temptin…

Everything added to your schedule necessitates subtracting something else. A truth we ignore at our peril.

If you can’t answer that six-word question, you’re selling a commodity. Organizations don’t buy things, people do. And people at companies aren’t spending their own money, s…

The Choluteca Bridge, in Honduras, was built in an area known for hurricanes and other strong weather. It was designed to withstand the destructive force of a hurricane so when hurricane Mitch came through later that same year, it was no surprise that the bridge sustained only minor damage. Clearly, it had been designed and implemented well.

Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Without UX, “data-driven” organizations can only use that data to confirm their biases, not to understand where to change course.

Driving a tank in the Second World War was a high-stakes, scary, and dangerous job.  So tank crews did what humans tend to do in unpredictable,

Dan Dennett explained that it began as a survival mechanism. It’s important to predict how someone else is going to behave. That tiger might be a threat, that person from the next village mig…

There are a number of cases where excessive pressure in the software development process leads to certain perhaps undesirable designs.

Perfect output is not the desired outcome.

Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones. The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then anothe…

Have you ever been in a hotel room with your spouse and kids, tucked away in this liminal space, enjoying the feeling that no one could find you (and kind of hoping that no one ever would), and thought to yourself: “This is all I need in the world”? There has been some lament in […]

There’s the immutable law of business: whenever a new way of working comes long, albeit from tech or social change, people will try to game it. So be it

Learn how to spot the difference between and expert and an imitator with 5 key tells.