The convenience fee
Sometimes it’s obvious, like the $1 that you get charged for using an ATM or a credit card, and it’s simply not worth the hassle to walk a few blocks. And sometimes it’s not, like…
Operating effectively in high surprise mode
When you deploy a service into production, you need to configure it with enough resources (e.g., CPU, memory) so that it can handle the volume of requests you expect it to receive. You’ll wan…
Stop Climbing, Start Surfing
This image is an idea inspired by the Dr Pippa Malmgren interview on the Infinite Loops Podcast #167. In the podcast, Dr Malmgren describes leadership,
Create value
If your job feels like a dead end, it might be because you’ve traded agency and responsibility for the feeling of security. But real security lies in creating value. Creating value isn’…
Sunday Firesides: No Bad Feelings
We typically sort feelings into two categories: the good (calm, contentment, lightness, elation) and the bad (anxiety, shame, disappointment, grief). Believing that the good help happiness and the bad hinder it, we cling to the former and avoid, ward off, and theraputize the latter. Yet, while feelings can be lighter or heavier, easier or harder, […]
The maverick and the status quo
The future isn’t the same as the past. Technology develops, systems change and most of all, someone cares enough to make things better. The maverick isn’t the selfish gunslinger of myth…
The length trick
It’s possible that the memo or video is simply too long. A 14 minute video explaining how to have a 10 minute brainstorming meeting might benefit from some editing. But it might be that your …
Text is the Universal API
Is its pattern strange to you?
How I use AI when blogging and writing at andrewchen
Belief is contagious
Placebos work and placebos spread. We’re wired to believe something, but the specifics of what we believe often come from other people. When there were a limited number of channels, mainstrea…
Get your work recognized: write a brag document
Beating the Average
Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
Beating the Averages
Childish or childlike?
Childlike involves wonder. It’s the ability to see the world with fresh eyes and create magic. Childish, on the other hand, is living as if there are no consequences. Over time, we’ve g…
Ask vs guess culture
When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.
For customers vs to customers
In the life of every enterprise, the moment arises when a choice has to be made: Are you here for your customers, to give them what they seek, or are you trying to do something to your customers, t…
How to Do Great Work
Hope, Paint, and Darkness
I don’t know what happiness could feel like without a background layer of pain.
Marketing at the End of the World
The world is ending. Does marketing even matter anymore?
The Land of Imperfect Data.
The technology press is once again in an uproar over half-truths and incendiary comments by Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter. He indicated that he’s going to remove the “block” feature from Tw…
On the dot
Hardy came home from school and proudly showed his mom the cheap plastic trinkets he had earned that day. “I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quie…
Infohazard Warning: How Internal Memes Infect Your Brain | Psychology Today
The unsurprising confusion about ‘per capita’
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…
Defending the apostrophe
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…
Ride your own bike
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 (very) long tail
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 best laid plans
The thing is, I was totally going to write today.
The Ideal Man According to 7 Different Philosophers
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 […]
If you can’t tell a story about it, it isn’t real
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…