Betterment

Bust through creative ruts, gain immense mental clarity, and produce consistent genius level ideas.

A few thoughts on the past month.

“If I were you…” or, more commonly, “if you were me.” Management has never been easy, but as the world becomes more complex, it gets more difficult. We’d like to…

There is a famous scene in the 2023 movie, “Barbie”, where Gloria (America Ferrera) gives a passionate speech about all the paradoxes of being a woman in

How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure?

There’s an interesting dynamic to be observed in the Gospels.  Often, before Jesus will heal or bless someone, he makes them answer a question: “What do you want?” This is true when the request someone wishes to make isn’t immediately apparent, as when Jesus is approached by the mother of James and John or when […]

The secret that got me 19K subscribers in 9 months

Paving the ground might be an option. Pavement is invisible to the driver. It’s expected, smooth, resilient and gets out of the way. You only notice a road when it’s not paved well. Nat…

Consider building a word cloud of your writing. It might be all the text on your website, or the last 50 emails you sent. It might be your new book or the speech you’re going to give at Rice …

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the

We’re in the middle of a huge and unusual shift. The magazine publisher acted like the best sales were newsstand sales, even though the profit came from subscriptions and most people simply v…

This question is a trap. It’s based on scarcity and entitlement, and most of all, the world isn’t listening. When more and more people focus on this question, it simply pushes us apart.…

In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes about the "new generation" of online culture creators: curators, who "guided by their own cultivated sense of taste, ... bring their audiences news and insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music, food, or film." In

Over on the Weekend University YouTube Channel, the well-known Yale psychology professor, Paul Bloom talks about suffering, as in, one of Buddha’s famous

There’s often doubt. Giving someone the benefit of that doubt enables us to move forward, and that requires us to realize that our doubt might be unfounded. Systems that assume goodwill creat…

Where’s your permit? Who said you could try to solve this problem? I don’t get it… That’s too original. It’s not original enough. You missed a comma. That’s not …

What makes for a fulfilled life, a meaningful life? Many answers have been offered to this question. But Otto Paul Kretzmann, a professor and pastor of the mid-20th century, articulated what is perhaps the truest and pithiest formulation of the good life. Kretzmann said that if man is to survive, flourish, and stay sane in […]

It’s possible that your day will be more enjoyable if you are insulated from the market. If you have a boss who has a boss… If you don’t have to review the sales numbers for the p…

The first was radio and television. Humans around the world spending a significant portion of their waking hours consuming audio and video recordings of other people. The second was the internet. F…

Massive leaps in utility and quality are extraordinary events. Going from ver 2.0 to 3.0 is a step change. But that is almost never what improvement looks like. Instead, the persistent commitment t…

In just about every group, people decide in advance how they’ll show up when it comes to learning, to winning and to responding to opportunities. They’re wearing a hat with a label, and…

We’re thrilled that you want to contribute to improving the system in the wake of an incident! For each post-incident action that you are proposing, we would appreciate it if you would fill o…

Most people have heard of or seen slide rules, with older generations likely having used these devices in school and at their jobs. As purely analog computers these ingenious devices use precompute…

In late midlife, a man tends to look back on the preceding decades, assess the standing of his health, relationships, professional achievements, and experiences, and determine whether or not his life has been a success.  But the timeline used in this assessment should be significantly longer — extending much farther back and far further forward.  […]

There was a tweet recently, talking about Ernest Hemingway. To paraphrase:  “Agreed, Hemingway was a deeply flawed human being. But so what,  you’re a

Two of the building blocks of a resilient society. And the opposite of the lazy shortcut. The meanings of both clauses change over time… Play fair: Everyone gets an opportunity to participate…

You’re probably familiar with the 80-20 rule: when 80% of the X stems from only 20% of the Y. For example, 80% of your revenue comes from only 20% of your customer, or 80% of the logs that yo…

AI agents are going to overhaul the way we think about buying and selling. Uber already did this in a small way. They organized the drivers, and now they organize the riders. Hailing a cab was alre…

As you may be aware, I’m a daily user of the note taking and management application, Obsidian. It is an incredibly useful tool that lets me build my own vaults of information that I can then easily cross reference and search. It has become my personal wiki tool of choice. My use of Obsidian runs a wide gamut across personal and professional aspects of my life, and I can often be found in deep focus working on any number of notes. But times are that sometimes I want to quickly add something to another note. Typically this might be to add an activity log entry to a daily note, but it could also be to add an idea to a running note, or the name of a TV show to watch. I have found myself skipping in and out of notes and disrupting my flow of work. I decided that I should come up with a solution that allowed me to add entries to other notes from any note, and that is what I’m going to cover in this post.

Tags are an alternative to the categorisation inherent to Johnny.Decimal. I have thoughts.