Betterment

Have you ever had an interaction with someone where you asked them question after question about themselves, but they never asked you a single thing? What was supposed to be a cooperative, back-and-forth dance, became a one-sided monologue. They did all the talking; you did all the listening. There’s a name for this all-too-common phenomenon: […]

Robert Johnson is known as the king of the Delta blues. One reason is that his small output was brilliant. The other, bigger reason is that the recordings that remain of his short life are among th…

Evolutionary social scientist (and also one of the co-founders of Cards Against Humanity of all things), David Pinsof, has one of the most amusing blogs

Learn what “Building a Second Brain” is, how it relates to the Zettelkasten Method, and how to perfectly combine both methods.

If you go to a health food store and buy some pills with selenium, colloidal silver or other mysterious substances in them, it’s possible that they’ll make you feel a bit better. On the…

Elon Musk is thought to have paid about $44 billion to buy Twitter. That was last October.  Yesterday he made his latest attempt to wreck it. He posted these tweets: Not only did he introduce limits on the number of tweets a person could see when his whole business model is utterly...

The future never arrives, of course, but it has a powerful force that’s impossible to avoid. We can see it as a threshold, a doorway toward something new. Or we can fight it as an unwanted ch…

When Americans think back to the War of Independence, most are apt to feel that, had they lived back then, they would have been Patriots for sure. In retrospect, the decision to rebel and get out from under the thumb of British rule seems inevitable. Yet only around a third of colonists ever declared themselves […]

You come home from a hard day at work feeling like you could use a stiff drink. You contemplate sleeping in and skipping your morning workout because you stayed up a little later than usual last night. Your kid is throwing a tantrum in a store because he wants you to buy him a toy. […]

Some puzzles about the best way to learn. What do you think works best?

One show can make Netflix’s year. One stock can make the numbers for an investor. One player can drive a team to victory. The key is, “I’m not sure which one it’s going to b…

Digital abundance creates a new problem. Most of our lives are filled with “or” decisions. You can have this or that. You can save money for the big party or you can go out for lunch. Y…

According to Ray Dalio, mankind’s highest purpose is to evolve. Why? Because evolution is the fundamental nature of the universe. Not just with living

For a certain cohort of high-performing students at famous colleges, graduate school feels irresistible. If you’re good at school, the challenge and offer of law school, med school or a famou…

Culture makes it tempting (and easy) to insulate ourselves from reality. Credit card debt is an invisible burden, until it’s not. Ignoring the changes in our climate makes our days easier, bu…

In 1990, what would become one of the most famous quotes from Jack Welch, the late business titan and former CEO of GE, was featured in an annual report.

Henry David Thoreau never had a standard professional life (though we can still learn much from his ideas about work). Yet he was productive in his own way, keeping to a daily routine that was broken into two main chunks: in the mornings he read and wrote at his desk; in the afternoons he sauntered […]

Crisp faces many opponents: entropy, laziness, time, compromise and false shortcuts. And fear. Most of all, fear. Things rarely become crispy on their own. Instead, it requires care and effort. An …

Andrew Reiner writing on his research into the emotional struggles of men: They receive very mixed messages: Men are too soft. Men are toxic. But one thing is clear: traditional tropes of masculinity — the tough guy who swallows his feelings and solves his own problems — no longer serve boys, men

…perhaps we should stop. Unless the going was the point.

Ever have one of those days when you’re just tired of gossip? Gossip among your friends. Neighborhood gossip. Office gossip. Online gossip. Political

When you welcome a child into the world, folks often tell you: “Savor this time. The days are long, but the years are short!” This is certainly sage and accurate counsel. There are moments as a parent when you can’t believe how quickly your kids are growing up.  Yet, the fact that a culture of […]

The empty part of the drawer is what makes it a useful tool. Same goes for a filing cabinet, a toolbox and a calendar. Slack is underrated.

I’ve recently restructured my Home note in Obsidian using some dataview queries as a result of doing the Linking Your Thinking workshop.

A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works…

Posted on Friday 23 Jun 2023. 320 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.

The wrong question is, “our project isn’t catching on, how do we promote it better?” The right question is a little more nuanced and far more important, “We’re seeking…

AI is the big new thing these days. New, new, it’s all so new. Except when it isn’t. For example, here’s an article in the Washington Post about