Betterment

When it comes to our native languages, researchers already have a pretty good idea of how we learn words, and it’s not through studying vocabulary lists. Here's what it takes.

Why is that? The new diet. The fundraising after a natural disaster. The relationship. The hype cycle of a new technology or the media frenzy around a hot new fad or candidate… It always feel…

Hack the Motivation Trap: Protect Your Team

Explore the balance between strategic and tactical mindsets in the field of engineering. This article discusses the importance of both perspectives in problem-solving, goal setting, and planning for the future. It also highlights how the focus shifts from tactical to strategic as engineers advance in their careers. Ideal for engineering leaders and team members seeking to improve their productivity and strategic thinking.

Some people go to the gym for health and energy. Some go to lift more weight than they did yesterday (or more than the person next to them). You can start a company to make an impact and surround y…

Thoughts on searching out your co-founder online.

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash hobby: a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation obsession: a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unrea…

Courage is a generous act that involves risk. It’s not courageous to hang out with friends and make a crank phone call. The risk involved might be actual risk (it took courage to go to the mo…

This post is an idea inspired by the Dr Pippa Malmgren interview over at the Infinite Loops Podcast #167. According to Dr Malmgren, because certainty does

There’s no such thing as work life balance. There’s simply life. And you spend part of your life at work. One way to change the pressure of work is to expand or contract the size of the…

For the last couple of centuries, ever since the Enlightenment (and even well before that), we’ve been enamored with the idea of being ruled by reason and

Activities like writing, gardening and knitting can improve your cognition and mood. Tapping, typing and scrolling? Less so.

Questions people ask themselves when looking at a web page aimed at businesses (B2B). They are rhetorical, but should give you a place to begin: Is it my job to deal with this? Who sent me here? Wi…

I appreciate Mr. Zakharchenko’s extensive critique of TDD even as I have some reservations regarding his language. He tried TDD. He thought about it. He put his thoughts out there. He knew he was going to get a reaction & he did—300K views, 160 comments, 190 reposts, 1000 likes.

If we’re going to come together and invest the time in conversation, in research or in analysis, we should begin by understanding what would be required for you or I to change our minds. If y…

Belonging at scale is an age-old problem. When your company is just a wee startup with a few people renting desks in a coworking space, it's easier to

I've written, prescriptively, that money shouldn't buy anything that matters: not healthcare or education, for example. Anything we can do, we can afford But at the top level money can't buy anything you couldn't do anyway. Anything we can't do, we can only buy from others. The Britian of the thirties was still, despite all…

The idea of self-explanations took off and became a studying meme that has since gone far beyond my own audience. Here are 5 ideas you must keep in mind to get the most out of it.

Michael Lopp helped coin an important term. When you’re a skilled craftsperson with high market value, there may be recruiters knocking on your door. An employee who has ‘shields up&#82…

“Household management” has become something of an interest and a watchword for me this year, due to the coincidental confluence of two books coming into my life at the same time. The first is Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. Several months ago, two friends, one male and one […]

As an organization grows in scale, the idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness that was originally informed by the taste of the founders moves toward the mean. Over time, things get more average. That’s b…

As an organization grows in scale, the idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness that was originally informed by the taste of the founders moves toward the mean. Over time, things get more average. That&#82…

The only reason we need to go into detail about our resume, the details of our new idea or the features of a product is to cause action to happen. And action is the result of tension, status or aff…

Humans have a strong impulse to see things that are arbitrary or conventional as natural and essential – especially language

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.