Betterment

Get top tips on effective job searching, networking, and resume crafting to turn recent tech layoffs into new opportunities

If you announce that something is elegant or classy, it probably isn’t. There’s a humility to hospitality and sophistication that evaporates when we name it.

Rick Rubin could have written about the music industry and insider stories. Instead, he spent eight years writing what is basically a spiritual text about making something meaningful.

We typically associate hunger with the desire for food. But there are, in fact, half a dozen other appetites that exist within the human organism, each of which must be fed to maintain physical, mental, and spiritual health: Sunlight. Place a houseplant in the shadows, and its leaves wilt and droop. While invisible to the […]

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” -Mark Twain. So are the reports of everyone hating their jobs, apparently. It turns out “The Great

We can wrestle with a challenge or a problem and find energy and possibility while doing it. And we can dance with someone else as we seek a mutual way forward. Fighting tends to be more brutal, fi…

Human beings as we know them have only been around for 70,000 years or so. Honeybees got to North America around the time Columbus did. And the same is true for technologies and companies. Western …

A colleague got an angry note. It concluded with, “you should know better.” The transgression? The sender was offended that my friend had written a post about a concept she’s been…

Charlie Munger passed away last week. He was the less famous part of Berkshire Hathaway, but gained great prominence over the last 20 years. At the time

They’re not the same thing. Hope can fuel us. Hope can be refilled. Hope opens the door to possibility. Expectations, on the other hand, are a trap. They make us brittle and lead to disappoin…

A subjective and practical guide on what to do if you want to create data visualizations yourself (including lots of exercises and examples!)

In advertising, "The Brief" is the written marching orders that an agency gives to its creative department for an assignment. Usually it’s only one or two

Today we're going to have a discussion about living with a chronic illness and the need to advocate for yourself in the face of indifference to your pain or refusal of treatment from doctors or your insurance company. After two long years of inconclusive tests, and ten years of delayed

In the moment, it’s really difficult. L’espirit descalier means, “the spirit of the staircase.” That thing you wished you had a said just a moment ago, the bon mot or the cl…

Swap paper plates for fine china, take-out for gourmet home-cooked fare, and LED lighting for the glow of flickering candles, and you significantly change how a dinner at home feels. An otherwise ho-hum meal is transformed into something special, with different vibes and the sparkle of romance.  Everyone recognizes that intentionally setting the mood for […]

Here’s a simple grid that might change the way you think about internal stories: When we believe in something that’s useful but not true, it can serve a helpful purpose. The tooth fairy…

Presented an Obsidian Wikidata plugin at the Wikidata data modelling event 2023

The word on the street is the latest Disney animated movie, “Wish” is a box office disaster. And it was by no means the first, either. It turns out it’s

How about an astrolabe? Or even a watch? Technology advances, and sooner or later, the old stuff gets left behind. It’s easy to romanticize some of the classic devices that we built civilizat…

Traditional fairytale structure fits naturally in our brains, and thus can guide strategic problem-analysis, and a plan that everyone understands.

Being genuinely smart isn’t just about having a high IQ or being a whiz at trivia. According to psychology, there’s much more to intelligence than that. It’s about how you […] More

Most of us know about the recent brouhaha of Sam Altman and OpenAI. The big story, of course, is what on earth made the staff react this way? It’s clear

They’re almost always conservative. Whether it’s a governmental body, the strategy group at a big company or the membership panel at the local country club, we can learn a lot by seeing…

Motivation Memorizing the periodic table has some practical value, especially if you're a chemist, but in any case it's an interesting exercise, easier to do than it may sound. And it's a case study for how you might memorize other things of more practical value to you personally. Major system pegs The Major system is

People talk about Hobson’s choice as if it’s always a bad thing. A liveryman in pre-industrial London, he rented horses. And every customer was allowed to take the horse closest to the …

Intentional recovery is a sustainable investment in the next wave of performance and can break the day into a series of short, highly engaged sprints.

If you’re a freelancer or a contractor of any kind, it’s typical to be asked for an estimate or a quote. And if you’ve been doing business for a while, it’s likely that you&…

Why do we convince ourselves that we cannot learn certain skills or subjects? A dive into what makes learning hard and how we can make it easier.

Smoked Brisket tastes better in Texas. Bagels taste better in New York. Haggis tastes better in Scotland. Coffee tastes better in Santo Domingo. Yes, a