Betterment

Crafting the earliest planes and nurturing remarkable cultures have more in common than you might think. In the “air-race,” the Wright Brothers had a lot

New approaches will never be embraced by everyone at first. If you need unanimous consent, you’re not going to move forward. And it’s not convenient. If it were, someone would have done…

To win a Nobel prize a hundred years ago, you might only need a legal pad and a few pencils. Today, it takes millions of dollars, scores of people and many years of effort. That’s because the…

Their big promise has fizzled out.

And those are the two challenges of anyone seeking to make an impact. First, we get distracted by the inclination to make the group as big as we can imagine. After all, the change is essential, the…

In many creative industries, there’s a similar pattern. When the stakes are very low, most creators produce things that are fairly banal and ordinary. Part of that is the law of large numbers…

There’s been a lot of big stuff happening in the news recently, most of it bad. And it is all a big deal. However, one of the biggest stories of all, the

It’s classic linkbait. Headlines that explain why something is happening. Questions to AI about why something happens. Even kids, asking their parents. Why is easy to sell. Why is hard to del…

This past year I published my first book. While it was a rewarding experience, there were many challenges and obstacles along the way. But one thing I did in the beginning was figure out tooling so that writing and reviewing the book wasn’t a painpoint. I’m a Linux user and it was on Linux that I wrote this book, but the tooling should work on MacOS or Windows as well.

Kindergarten teachers matter more than you think. Chess isn’t a talent, it’s a learned practice. We’re sorting for head starts, not growth. And that’s just the first chapter…

Forty years ago, Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote about emotional labor. The work that frontline employees had to do (especially women) in managing and expressing emotions as part of their job. She t…

Water flows downhill, and tech solves the easy problems first. After the launch of Amazon and Google, when smartphones reached critical mass, an easy problem to solve involved bridging information …

Complicated problems have a solution, and the solution can often be found by breaking the complicated portions into smaller pieces. And complicated problems often have an emotional component, becau…

A recent article from the New York Times highlights a growing trend in corporate team building: extreme activities. Some companies spend up to $100K on

How do we know if we’re doing a good job? In some fields, it’s always been pretty easy to tell. Either the building falls down or it doesn’t. Either the car starts after you charg…

There I was, standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company organized, feeling like a fish out of water. The room was filled with

Obsidian, the indie darling of notetaking apps, rejects everything you know about modern software. And it's working.

I’ve spent the past year losing 80 lbs and getting in shape. A lot of people have been asking me how I did it; specifics like what diet I…

Here’s a simple XY grid to help you think about your next project, freelance career or startup: All too common are ‘fun’ businesses where someone finds a hobby they like and tries…

I lost a cookbook the other day. After twenty more minutes of searching, there it was, right on the cookbook shelf. But the spine was much more subtle than the cover, and it hadn’t been what …

Ever since we did our in-depth series about the seasons of a man’s life (truly some of the most interesting articles we’ve written — I highly recommend reading them!), I’ve continued to think about human development, particularly in adulthood. Most books and articles on development focus on the transition between childhood and adolescence and adolescence […]

Write what you like to read, and regardless of what others think, you’ll have something you can be proud of.

Archimedes of Syracuse, an Ancient Greek mathematician, engineer, and inventor, was obsessed with the idea of leverage. “If you give me a lever and a

AI pushes us to do what we actually get paid to do: make decisions. Craft used to drive our hours or even days. Get the pen lines just right. Source the Letraset. Get your instrument in tune. Sweat…

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

Perhaps they were chosen a very long time ago. Or with very little thought. It could be that the constraints that led to the default are long gone. They might be perpetuating bad choices, injustice…

In the critically acclaimed TV series, Mad Men, the main character, a troubled advertising Creative Director named Donald Draper, gets into an argument

It’s a tempting shortcut. Different kinds of people prefer pop tarts to pizza, or prefer expensive wine to beer, or prefer amusement parks to bowling. Except everyone is the same and everyone…

You may be familiar with the famous object lesson Stephen Covey used to reveal the importance of priorities. Imagine an empty jar, a bucket of big rocks, and a bucket of gravel. If you put the gravel in the jar first, it fills the jar’s capacity, and the big rocks won’t fit. But, if you […]