Betterment

If you’re gonna join an early stage1 startup, there are a few questions that I think you should ask the founders. This is by no means a comprehensive list. In fact most of these questions are obvious, but sometimes the obvious ones are the important ones. Also, I’m not exactly an expert on startups, these are just based off of my limited experience. What does the company do? This is a really obvious question and yet it will reveal a lot.

A gift doesn’t diminish the giver. Sharing creates connection, possibility and energy. And the magic of gratitude is that it improves everything it touches, especially the person who offered …

Re. Thanksgiving week. Every time the last week of November rolls by, there’s a predictable collective wail online from people who don’t like

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise your stuff

In the lead up to the D-Day invasion, Allied forces would fly surveillance planes over the mainland of France to scope out the territory. They saw miles

Posted on Tuesday 21 Nov 2023. 584 words, no links. By Matt Webb.

Here’s a large blue bedsheet, queen sized. If we’re going to pull it taut, it will take the coordinated effort of eight people, each pulling just the right amount, from each corner and …

Covering some of the people who have influenced my thinking the most, from Richard Feynman to Siegfried Engelmann.

The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman

A well-designed bicycle is efficient, inexpensive and delightful. If you use your bike on the right paths, with appropriate goals, it can deliver exactly what you need, while also allowing you to g…

Somewhere, there is the ideal soil for growing mangoes. Or the best possible wave for surfing. Or the most romantic sunset for a proposal. But it’s not right here and it’s not right now…

They’re everywhere we look. Here are a few thoughts on the ones that won’t go away: First, is it a problem or a situation? Problems, by definition, have solutions. You might not like th…

For years, I’ve been using this picture of Neil Armstrong when I tell the story of meeting him and hearing his talk at one of his last public appearances: I wasn’t there when this photo…

The Cult of Done Manifesto is a special document. Written from bed with Kio Stark in our first few months of dating. It was one of those…

The Builders' Library gathers the expertise of Amazon's most experience builders in one place. One article that really got me thinking was Colm MacCárthaigh's "Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee" which is about an anti-fragility pattern that he developed for building simple, more robust, and cost-effective systems.

We’re in Italy this week for a client engagement. Walking around the piazza at the center of town has us thinking surely this must be the happiest nation

That’s the avoidable one and the one that usually causes the real trouble. When the first mistake flusters us, breaks our rhythm or messes with our confidence, we’re far more likely to …

My new short LinkedIn class on project management just launched, and I’ll be discussing it live today with Amanda Ruud … we’ll be there if you want to bring your questions. Sooner…

Apple didn’t succeed because of the way Steve Jobs dressed. Just like SBF’s hair didn’t put him in jail. We can look at the outré behavior of various Silicon Valley overlords and …

Make It New

Here are the people who have most greatly influenced my thoughts on learning.

It might feel like an endless slog now, but when the innovation appears, people won’t remember how long it took to get here. Often, we assume that today’s snapshot is actually the entir…

The Third Attractor, The Third Horizon, and the Third Reality

They say one does their best work when they’re actually not working, but in a state of play, or as the clever folk like to call it, “Flow.” According to

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise projects (or your life, or anything else)

“I don’t want to send this pitch to a list of every single podcaster in the world, but we have to get the word out.” “I don’t want to send an email to every one of our…

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is known as one of the greatest movies of all time. It’s usually found in most serious film critics’ top-ten lists. Three

Many moths are attracted to light. That works fine when it’s a bright moon and an open field, but not so well for the moths if the light was set up as a bug trap. Processionary caterpillars f…

Hibernating animals spend the fall feasting, putting on weight in preparation for the months to come, when sufficient food won’t be available. During the winter, they lay secure in their dens and don’t eat or drink for months, instead subsisting on their stores of fat. It’s a model that has some application to the human […]