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…
Outliers carry information. Don’t leave them on the table
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…
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 […]
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…
The Key to Sustainable Productivity - Scott H Young
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…
The Underrated Usefulness of Taking a Time Log - Scott H Young
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…
There are deep reservoirs of wisdom in the old carpentry adage, “measure twice, cut once.” The idea is that it’s easier to ensure you do something right
Here’s a breakthrough that’s about to happen somewhere: A GPT that reads every email that anyone in your organization has ever sent and makes it easy to ask it questions about what the …
Particularly when it comes to the future. And perhaps about the past. More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know. Where we can’t know. That’s a given…
Human beings never reveal all of our emotions. We don’t simply blurt out the first thing that pops into our head in a meeting, or insult someone upon meeting them. We’re able to give pe…
Perhaps you only acknowledge and focus on problems where you know and are comfortable with the appropriate response. Denying the existence of the other ones is easier than dealing with them. Or it …
The things we do each day, every day, often arrive without intent. By the time we realize that they’re now habits, these random behaviors have already become part of how we define ourselves a…
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals, advocate for taking extended breaks from work, as outlined in their book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work." While this practice is relatively common in many parts of the world, it's less common in North America.In this...