Betterment

The art of project management includes the dance between velocity and possibility. If you describe the outcome with specificity and remove as many variables as possible, you’ll get the work d…

There was a lovely trick that Gary Trudeau often used in his early Doonesbury cartoons.He would have the characters (Mike Doonesbury, BD, the Yale

Who are you to make things better? How dare you raise your hand to help, offer an idea, take responsibility… Perhaps it might be helpful to reframe that feeling as the generosity of improveme…

When you’re first learning to ride a bike, it can be frightening to get up some speed. But this is exactly what will make the ride a success. Take it too slow, and down you go. A similar principle is at work in mountain biking. When you spot an obstacle up ahead — a rock, […]

Interaction Jury Captain Stephanie Aaron shares her thoughts on how to quickly make a difference

There is a gigantic pool of talented engineers that nobody has figured how to tap into. They’re the people who don’t apply to jobs. If you can find these people, you can build an incredible team. It’s a pretty obvious statement to say that you only get candidates who apply, but that belies a major truth: A lot of people really really really hate applications. They will do anything to avoid filling a form.

Over on Instagram, fellow culture nerd, Nick Smoot, made an interesting comment about organizational culture. “Recently, I listened to a @nytimes podcast

Forty years ago, the royalty of rock spent the night in a studio to record one of the fastest-selling singles of all time. The documentary of the event is just okay, but it’s fascinating in h…

All purchases involve a decision. Yes or no, this or that, now or later… But it’s helpful to realize that all decisions involve a purchase. When we decide to spend time or take a risk o…

If, like Boeing, you’ve had a recent series of PR disasters due to internal oversights, what do you do? You decide to tweak your incentives policy. In the

A common shortcut to cultural divisiveness is to find the single worst person in a different group and highlight and attack their behavior. By making it clear and obvious that this is what THEY (th…

I’ve been dipping in and out of Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier for t

The realisation that linked notes are more useful than unlinked notes should be the start of your journey into the depths.

It’s negative when we say that someone is out of control. They’ve lost their self-restraint, and they’re doing things that they’ll regret later. And it’s honest when w…

Discover the 5BX HIIT workout - a quick and effective exercise program developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 1950s. Get fit in just 11 minutes a day.

When we feel like doing something selfish, indulgent, hurtful or short-term, we can simply decide to do it later. And when it occurs to us that we might be able to make a useful contribution or do …

In 1840, at the dawn of the information age, the king of Sardinia asked Charles Babbage what nearly instant messaging like the telegraph could possibly be good for. Twenty years later, it was obvio…

Learning is about becoming incompetent on our way to getting better. If you’re not open to the tension that is caused by knowing you could do better, it’s unlikely you’re willing …

The Artist goes fishing in the ocean. AI goes fishing in the aquarium. This is basically the problem people seem to be having with AI content creator

Masculinity has been scrutinized a lot lately. Rightly so. One thing men struggle to do well is friendship, which helps explain what’s wrong with masculinity.

Access to information used to be scarce. We ranked college libraries on how many books they had, and time at the microfilm reader was booked in advance. Today, if there’s something I don&#821…

In a previous story, I was talking about how you can use Anki to learn and memorize things easily. Today, I’m gonna talk about how you can…

Multiply the power of PKM with spaced repetition and active recall…

Pt.3 How to Augment Your Memory with Your Second Brain

Also — Cal Newport’s plan.txt, and the Plus, Minus Next method

How I used AI in my book about AI

One of the most famous paintings in The Louvre (besides the Mona Lisa) is the physically massive masterpiece from 1819, “The Raft Of The Medusa,” by

Studying for school can be hard, but the process is pretty straightforward: Outside of school, though, this strategy breaks down. It’s impossible even to be aware of all the books that might be useful for any given subject, never mind actually reading them all.  In an infinite library, choosing what material to learn dwarfs even […]