Betterment

How should you choose your next trip?  I can see a few general philosophies on the table: 1. Prioritize those countries and regions you haven’t visited yet.  For me that might mean Montenegro, Lithuania, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia.  But the downside is waking up one morning and saying “Hey, what the hell am I doing […]

Turning my Obsidian Rolodex into a queryable database!

Treating stuff as sacred interferes with thinking carefully and analytically about it: When we talk about sacred stuff, our minds focus more on style, metaphor, word connotation, and an overall feel, and less on the literal meanings of words and order. And it seems to me that this prediction, together with other known correlates of the sacred, helps to explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena. (Recall that the sacred is more to be intuited than thought, and that we tend to be more emotional about it.)

There are lots of books on creating cooking, photography, writing and music. But they can’t possibly help you do better until you see and taste and appreciate what you’re trying to crea…

The rules are pretty consistent: The easier it is to create and save a video or other file, the more likely it is to be lost or corrupted The more important the data is, the more likely it is you&#…

The first thing you learn when running a business is JUST how hard it is to find good people. This is true whether you’re running Lockheed Martin or a

Like many of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson was a dad. And like a lot of dads, he often took the opportunity to dispense unsolicited dad advice to his children. Over the years, he developed a list of ten life rules he would share with his children, grandchildren, and friends looking for guidance on parenting […]

If the thing of the moment is the answer to every single question, you might be in a bubble. If, regardless of the problem, the answer is crypto, homeopathy, or the internet, or perhaps GPT, essent…

A Gallup poll shows we're reading fewer books each year. Is this a trend to be worried about?

Rory Sutherland, the Co-Chairman of the ad agency, Ogilvy UK, wrote a book called "Alchemy," a couple of years ago, which we've previously written about.

If you’re looking to find out what all the fuss about Stoicism is about, this podcast is an excellent place to start. Nancy Sherman, The Georgetown and

It keeps getting shorter and shorter. This video couldn’t have been made, at any price, 18 months ago. 18 weeks ago, it would have required a thousand hours of work. Now, here it is. This imp…

After 25 years, I stopped using a certain credit card for business. It was easily millions of dollars worth of transactions over that period. Did anyone at the company notice? Did anyone care? I st…

ExRx.net is a resource for the exercise professional, coach, or fitness enthusiast. It offers evidence based exercise prescription tools and resources including reference articles, comprehensive exercise libraries, and fitness calculators. ExRx.net is a recommended resource in ACSM's Resource Manual for Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription (5th 6th, and 7th Editions). ExRx.net has also been an NSCA authorized CEU provider since 2008.

Large sections of Los Angeles are studded with billboards for minor TV shows. These billboards exist nowhere else, even though there are televisions globally. Obviously, there’s ego at work h…

Over a decade ago, I saw this talk by John Rauser. Only recently, though, did I come to realize how incredibly influential this talk has been on my career. Gosh what a great talk! You should watch …

Warm up the machines that take a long time first. Stress test the go/no go parts of the project as early as possible. If the cost is low, replace dependent processes with parallel ones. Do the diff…

Technical blogging is something I’ve been doing for a long time. This blog, alone, goes back 7 years but I had a few other blogs on different platforms. In this post, I want to highlight a handful of things that have really worked for me and that I’ve learned over this past decade+. Technical blogging has accelerated learning, grown my network, and given me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Not all projects become t-shirt brands, nor should they. The risk is in thinking you’re building one when you’re not. T-shirt worthy brands are a very small subset of the whole. The que…

One way to show status is by demonstrating how many resources you have. A bespoke suit, a huge graduation party, a fancy building… A bully who physically intimidates or an angry driver who cu…

Occupational factors associated with higher sperm concentrations and serum testosterone

Suppose you could add an extra two hours to every day: what would you do with your time? Would you take up a new hobby? Spend more time with friends or your family? Learn a new skill? Or simply give yourself more time to relax? In imagining how you’d spend an extra two hours, magically […]

Most developers often spend time on their setup, and I am no exception. These devices, tools, and software help me achieve that.

If you’ve borrowed money or sold shares, you’ll need to build something that’s worth more than your labor. Here are some key pillars where value lives: Customer tractionPermission…

If you’ve been following productivity advice for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced the following cycle: Why is productivity so difficult to sustain? Listen to this article I suspect a major cause of the difficulty is that we readily conflate two different ideas of what it means to “be productive.” The first is a […]

A fundamental building block of civilization is the understanding that contracts matter. Regardless of where someone is on the current political spectrum (from Alinksy to Mises), things can be unde…

We’ve heard this story many times. The one about the hippy who travels all the way to Bali. Climbs a mountain, sits on top of it for a week, and is

Peter Drucker, the eminent management theorist who coined the term “knowledge worker,” made a compelling case for figuring out where your time goes: Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time […]

Many projects are never finished. There are countless broken and not-quite-fixed cars in garages. There are crafts projects, massive redevelopments and everything in between. They sit unfinished be…