Betterment

Dwight D. Eisenhower started smoking cigarettes in his junior year at West Point. He would soon begin smoking them in a near-endless chain. He could smoke fifteen cigarettes in the course of a few hours, and regularly worked his way through two to three packs a day. In the weeks leading up to the Invasion […]

We usually think of militaries as rigid. But the best militaries operate with a fair bit of flexibility. Churchill once remarked that the Wehrmacht was

_______ is [Always/Never] the solution to a problem. In my experience, “always” and “never” are rarely useful ways to approach a problem. “Sometimes” requires nu…

This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren’t sure how, we can help

The American showman P.T. Barnum published a book of rules for making money called The Art of Money Getting. Here are the 20 rules

“As soon as possible” is a trap if you focus on soon instead of possible.

Big tech layoffs and hiring freezes are all the rage these days. Meta (AKA Facebook) just announced major layoffs. Lyft has reported plans to cut staff by

While it’s tempting to view our days as an amusement park with unlimited rides, that’s not really true. It might not maximize our impact or enjoyment either. In fact, we each have a lim…

No can do. We drift. Our standards aren’t set in stone. They change over time, often based on the situation we’re in. This explains how cults or extreme views occur. Not all at once, bu…

What can we build for 2050? Thirty years ago this month, I created 18 Pine Street, a series of young adult novels with bestselling author Walter Dean Myers. He was a brilliant creator and a delight…

Your house contains products from hundreds of thousands of suppliers and craftspeople. The food you eat comes to you from a very loosely coordinated (not organized, not controlled) network of milli…

A brief guide to deliberate practice for coders.

It’s easy to imagine that they are, as it lets us off the hook as habits become negative, or even addictions. If someone else is thriving without the habit we seem to need, then it’s li…

It’s certainly a common excuse for being stuck. In fact, there are more good ideas right now than ever before. That’s not the hard part. Need a name for your project? This site will not…

Faithful, English translation of Niklas Luhmann's original notes on Zettelkasten.

Infinity is seductive. 1,000 emails take up just as much space (and cost just as much) as one. An online bookstore can carry every book ever published. And the long tail of music gives every single…

In a seminal study on critical thinking and education in 1941, Edward Glaser defines critical thinking as follows “The ability to think critically, as conceived in this volume, involves three thing…

You probably brushed your teeth this morning. And will do so tonight. And 730 more times in the year to come. As soon as the last load of laundry is folded, it’s time to put in another wash. As soon as you’re done eating and cleaning up one meal, it’s time to start making the […]

Walt Whitman said it best back in 1855: “I contain multitudes." We all do. We all carry different identities around with us, often in competition with

The science behind how (and when) to mix things up in order to accelerate your improvement.

Some problems lend themselves to reexamination. A second, third or even fourth thought is productive, because our initial impulses might not reflect our best effort at understanding the nuances of …

Michael Abrashoff took the worst-performing ship in the Navy to the best without changing a single member of the crew. Learn how he did it.

It is much harder to predict foreign policy outcomes, especially in times of turmoil when there is no “nothing happens” default path, than it is to predict the results of economic policies.  There is no coherent model, no causal identification in the data, and the data are not very good or well-partitioned to begin with. […]

It’s hopeful to believe that the NFT, baseball card or even car that we next purchase is going to go up in value. It probably won’t. The secret is to only acquire things where the resal…

Understanding how to create value as a principal. Why do we do it? What does it mean? How to think about it. How to execute and sustain it.

Change without listening doesn’t happen.  Why is this true? When you don’t listen, it signals that you think you already know enough. And if you think

Objections are helpful. We object by holding back action or support because we question one or more pieces of data. But the other half of this is the obligation: if the data ends up meeting the sta…