Betterment

We Americans all know the Founding Fathers. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Franklin. The usual suspects.  What we talk less about is the Founding Mother.

Pricing is an exchange of value. This for that. But price is also a story. When you have competition, your story doesn’t have to justify the absolute price, simply the difference between you …

Some reflections on how I managed to stick to exercising every day, and what might have held me back in the past.

What I am working on at the moment (Apr 2026) Professional AgendaScope — a SaaS platform designed for teams growing from ‘founding team’ to ’leadership team’ to solve issues around priority, misalignments, decision making and the inevitable meetings. AgendaScope is built by myself and Alan Bradburne. It is an Elixir LiveView application. Some use of coding agents but the app pre-dates them by some time. Welcome Our New Robot Overlords — a newsletter for people thinking about implementing artificial intelligence in the business and/or personal life that I am writing in collaboration with Chris Bateman of International Hobo.

Maybe my reading taste buds are dull. Maybe I’m in a lazy slump. Do I need more books? More appealing choices? Am I even asking the right question?

Some vegans don’t eat avocados. They’re concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice. But we live i…

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani's blog site and is being reposted here with the author's permission.Comprehension debt is the

If you’re hoping for this meeting or this performance or this engagement to produce something extraordinary, why are you setting it up as if it’s ordinary? The hard work of a brainstorm…

There’s a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better. When we say even better, we lock in a foundation — we’re affirming that s…

“Fight Club” (1999), starring Ed Norton (as “The Narrator”) and Brad Pitt (as “Tyler Durden”) is considered one of the best movies of its decade. A real

Engineers, scientists, and most of all, businesses are looking for the right answer. It’s such a common quest that we take it for granted, but it’s new, and it continues to cause stress…

Three of my friends got hacked this week. You get an ecard and click. It asks you to log in to your email. Boom, done. It hacks your email account, steals all of your contacts and then sends itself…

Not only are AIs far more agreeable than humans when advising on interpersonal matters, but users also prefer the sycophantic models.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told

You know the old cliché about the moon and the stars?  That if you shoot for the moon and miss, it’s all well and good because you’ll still land among the

The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn’t at anyone else’s door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it wa…

There’s a great novel that came out in 1949, “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles. It’s about a married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, two wealthy but

Explore the delirious rantings of Frederick Vanbrabant. A blog focused on the intersection of Enterprise Architecture, product, and business strategy.

Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages. But no writer knows all the words. That’s the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie–between the universal letters …

Five evidence-based strategies that don't require becoming a LinkedIn influencer

In the 1970s, the late academic, Thomas McGovern who was well known in environmental circles at the time proposed a nice explanation for why the Norse

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even mak…

Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts. Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s…

It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are setti…

We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re …

If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing sessio…

If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than…

Withdraw, endure, or laugh? The ancients have some advice about facing disillusionment.

The internet has stopped being a place we visit — it’s now an environment we inhabit.

Robert Trivers died last week, perhaps the greatest evolutionary biologist of the last century. Though not as famous as his colleague, Richard Dawkins, he