Betterment

The culture of always being ON and hustling. Every hobby needs to be a "side hustle", and every moment of your time needs to be productive The world has gone crazy with the cult of the constant grind.

Cordovan leather is known for its durability, beauty, and high price tag. Today, we answer just why it's so expensive!

Skepticism is a virtue. It requires a willingness to question conventional wisdom, and the guts to accept something after you discover that it’s actually true. Denialism, on the other hand, i…

Fork this template! At Uma Chingunde’s suggestion, the learning circle I’m part of is doing a short detour on career trajectory, and I’ve written up a short template to use. This is similar to a career narrative, but with more focus on self-diagnosis than something presentable to others. I’ve been experimenting with reusable templates over on Infrastructure Engineering, and decided to try something similar here. (That experiment is itself inspired by Brie Wolfson’s use of templates in The Kool-Aid Factory.

The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few non-protagonists who experience their time in technology differently: a period of obligatory toil required to pry open the gate to the American Dream.

It’s not a luxury, it’s a choice. We can build slack into our lives. We can create cycles so that we don’t need to dance with a crisis around time on a regular basis. If there&#82…

Of course you’re interesting. There’s something about what you’ve done, what you say, how you show up in the world that’s worthy of interest. But that doesn’t mean tha…

Why would we want to wait until someone is perfect before we give them a chance to make things better? Each of us is part of a system, cogs in a process that rewards us for certain actions based on…

There’s a time gap. Marketers raise expectations in order to get someone to sign up and try a product and service. And (hopefully) there’s satisfaction, delight and remarkability once t…

I was on the edge of a burnout and here’s my story.

It’s complicated. Because we made it complicated. Our culture is built on the principle that people are responsible for what they do. And then we spend time and effort diffusing the responsib…

In an episode of a podcast I really respect, three of the experts quoted used words that I was familiar with: Debunk, gaslighting and cult. These are powerful words, words with specific and evocati…

Growing up, did you ever do one of those puzzles where you were shown a hyper-zoomed-in photo of some object or animal and had to guess what it was? It could be hard to recognize what you were looking at until you flipped to the zoomed-out answer. “Oh, it’s a butterfly.” Those ultra-close-up photos represent […]

Sometimes we’re not that good with time. If people got a hacking cough and a chronic disease an hour after smoking their first cigarette, it’s unlikely many people would smoke. If earth…

As soon as we mechanize, measure and perfect something, it becomes far less interesting. There’s not a lot of discussion about which factory made your can of Coke, because they’re all t…

This the fifth year that Huckberry will participate in the Murph Challenge and we've been humbled by how many of you have joined us. Tag a p

Factoid: In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously wrote about “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Notice how he didn’t say, “the

From Strength To Strength, by Arthur C. Brooks. “Decline is inevitable”. Brooks has written a really interesting book about how to manage the

The big leadership story of recent times is from President Zelensky from Ukraine. When offered safe passage by the Americans out of Kyiv when the Russians

We love this quote from Viktor Frankl. Culture is at its core, about creating meaning. Designing purpose. it is about finding that which unites us all. In

Suppose you’re learning a skill like algebra, programming or drawing. Consider two different strategies for studying: Examples first. Before you try anything on your own, study examples of how other people solve similar problems. Problems first. Before looking at any examples, try to solve the problem independently. If you fail or don’t get very far, […]

The internet has provided all of us with an advanced class on using innuendo, piercing invective and anger to make a point with our writing. Now, instead of simply seething or ranting, just about a…

It has been nearly a month since I posted something around here. I have been busy with work, life and reading. A lot of reading. Given the noisy state of media, I find books are a good source of in…

In 1993, when I was raising investment for one of the first internet companies, there weren’t any firms that specialized in this sort of thing. They were VCs from a different era, looking for…

This is a common sort of feedback/criticism/brainstorming, and it deserves a name. Show up toward the end, when most of the work has been done and it’s almost time to ship… Make a sugge…

What if organizations had a division that simply did the bad stuff? The people who were responsible for creating system updates that slow down old computers, that cover up bad behavior by employees…

It’s a stepping-stone, not a compromise. The media and our culture push us to build something for everyone, to sand off the edges and to invest in infrastructure toward scale. But it turns ou…

During World War II, Henry Beecher, an anesthesiologist serving in the U.S. Army, noticed that 32% of the soldiers he treated for horrific battle wounds felt no pain. A further 44% experienced only slight or mild discomfort, despite the fact they had shrapnel embedded in their bodies. Beecher hypothesized that the euphoria of surviving battle […]

Just Have a Think, a YouTube channel created by Dave Borlace, is one of my best sources for news about, and analysis of, the world energy transition. Here are some hopeful developments I’ve e…

The paradox of most tightly-knit communities is that they have an internal culture. And that culture often makes it difficult for a new person to join. It’s hard to have insiders if you don&#…