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…
Resilience requires helping each other out
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…
Reject Influence. Choose Prestige.
Discovering A More Impactful Online Presence For Technical Leaders
Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better.
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.
Avoid the Sharks
In the book, “Blue Ocean Strategies,” the authors talk about the difference between “Red Ocean Strategies” and “Blue Ocean Strategies.” “Red” means an
Leadership is Communication
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
Thinking about death?
Back in 2009, the British philosopher, Simon Critchley came out with a delightful read called “The Book Of Dead Philosophers.” Critchley believed that how
Does Pessimism Serve You?
Over on Chris Williamson’s “Modern Wisdom” podcast #651, the college professor AND bodybuilder, Dr Mike Israetel, spends time talking about “The Pessimism
The Next Next Job, a framework for making big career decisions at andrewchen
The useful agreement
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…
Why Interpret Me?
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.
Sunday Firesides: The Courage to Be Well
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 […]
Significant work is a vote
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…