Betterment

A car cut me off on the highway the other day. The car was going nearly 100 mph. Was the car a new Porsche 911 GT3 or a used Toyota Camry? The thing is, there are more than 1,000 times as many Camr…

Does it need defending? The sign on some bushes near a park in my town says, Beware: Bee’s. A local merchant adds a note to some receipts that says, Your awesome. It’s tempting to speak…

I was happily pedaling along on the rail trail when three spandex speedsters blew by me on their handmade carbon bikes. For a moment, I was disheartened. What’s the point–they’re …

The average YouTube video gets five new views every day. Let’s parse that for a second. 5 billion YouTube plays a day, spread over about a billion videos means that while some videos live in …

The thing is, I was totally going to write today.

What is the ideal man?  This is a question that philosophers have pondered over and riffed on for millennia.  Many philosophers have sketched out a vision of an ideal man who, unsurprisingly, encompasses the values that represent the pinnacle of their philosophical beliefs. These conceptions of ideal men are similar in that they all require […]

We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative, we can’t make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts o…

A common failure mode in complex systems is that some part of the system hits a limit and falls over. In the software world, we call this phenomenon resource exhaustion, and a classic example of th…

Discovering A More Impactful Online Presence For Technical Leaders

Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in our knowledge only become clear when explaining things to others.

In the book, “Blue Ocean Strategies,” the authors talk about the difference between “Red Ocean Strategies” and “Blue Ocean Strategies.” “Red” means an

Back in 1947, on her 21st birthday, Britain’s Princess Elizabeth (who would be crowned Queen Elizabeth II a half-decade later), in a speech to her nation

Back in 2009, the British philosopher, Simon Critchley came out with a delightful read called “The Book Of Dead Philosophers.” Critchley believed that how

Over on Chris Williamson’s “Modern Wisdom” podcast #651, the college professor AND bodybuilder, Dr Mike Israetel, spends time talking about “The Pessimism

Contrary to expectations, written contracts don’t have to be adversarial. In fact, the effective ones rarely are. When you hand someone a release, a royalty agreement or even a partnership do…

In a widely-used simple approximation, the world of thinking and writing is a world of specific arguments. Readers collect their opinions by combining the arguments of those they read/hear with arguments that they think of for themselves. In this approximation, the only reason to interpret a writer/speaker is to figure out what exactly are his or her arguments.

Courage is the willingness to face risk, discomfort, and intimidation. The modern world offers scarce opportunities to exercise courage. Few will ever see combat, and danger has largely been removed from work, travel, and the procuring of food. Whereas artistic and intellectual courage was once required in flaunting dominant paradigms, it is seldom called upon […]

When we show up to bring humanity to work, we’re making a choice. It involves risk and effort and emotional labor. We’re here to make a change happen, and we’re giving something t…

Anna and Kelly Pendergrast on the secret recipes, the superstition, and the myths embedded in what we call “innovation.”

The first step is to imagine what the people you serve want and care about it. The second is to figure out why they don’t have it yet. If you can help people get to where they seek to go, whe…

Back in 1961, at the height of the Cold War and three years after the creation of NASA, President Kennedy gave his famous “Moonshot” speech. "We choose to

When someone acts in a surprising way, we can begin to understand by wondering what they might be afraid of.

One weird trick for hacking the space-time continuum.

The candidate running for re-election offers truth. This is what I did, I would like to do it again. The candidate coming out of nowhere offers hope. We can’t know but we can imagine. Kicksta…

A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.

Following my mind-is-a-computer essay, I cover seven other popular-among-experts-but-widely-disbelieved opinions I agree with!

If the ferry is leaving in fifteen minutes, do you drive faster than normal to get to the dock on time? If someone is driving close behind you and pressuring you to turn when you don’t feel s…

“We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonize about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of