Defining the ‘what it’s like moment’ – a 10,000 hours rule for skill selection
In his influential paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the difficulty of ...
The Limits of Performance and the Universal Laws of Success
Once upon a time, while surfing the interweb, I was served a tweet recommending a book called The Formula: The ...
Desire’s Second Derivative
There is a famous observation from the world of advertising, often attributed to marketing guru Theodore Levitt, that "People don't ...
Effortless Creativity and the End of Sharing Anxiety – The 3-Speed Creativity Strategy: Finding Balance in Your Creative Work
I recently spoke to a friend about whether she should continue her YouTube channel, which would be in addition to ...
Tickets to the show – Feynman and the birth of the AI age, Sparks of AGI
In 1945, while Richard Feynman was a young physicist working on the Manhattan Project he and other scientists were invited ...
30 Quotes I’ve Known and Loved
I recently found myself reflecting on a few of these quotes and thought it would be nice to share some ...
Maximum Exposure – How Hemingway Went Bankrupt
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.” – Ernest Hemingway,The Sun Also ...
Quarantine Shopping & The Diderot Effect – Why You Can’t Stop Buying Shit
It is a principle of advertising that people who make big life changes are susceptible to marketing. Events like birth, ...
Jack Dorsey’s Sauna Routine
Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter and Square. But, despite being CEO of two billion-dollar companies, he lives more ...
Three Lessons from the Life of Leonardo Da Vinci
I’ve been listening to Walter Isaacson's Biography of the polymath Leonardo Da Vinci. A few anecdotes from his life struck ...
The Power of Negative Habits
One commonality among people’s New Year's resolutions is that they are mostly positive actions. Exercise more, eat better, learn the ...
How I’m Tracking Habits in 2019
The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken Warren Buffett ...
Why I Hate Books – My Favorite Book of 2018
My favorite book of 2018 was The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling I ...
Better is a Story
Why do self-help books exist? I'll tell you why. Write down your worst habit. Now go stop doing that. This ...
Why Motivation Doesn’t Work
Motivation is a treacherous currency because it is a fundamentally forward looking emotion. It is a why, why you’re doing ...
Do The Worst You Can
The thing that we learned, though, is that: every one of our films, when we start off, they suck. - ...
60 Days of Meditation With The Muse Meditation EEG Device
We all know someone who meditates. And we all wonder if it actually does anything for them. And more importantly, ...
Skill Changes Everything – How to Avoid Quitting Too Soon
“The problem with language is that it’s a little too facile, in so far as it leads us to believe ...
Ending Procrastination – Genius, Productivity & The Sisyphus Matrix
“Genius is the ability to get from A to D without going through B and C.” - Hollow Man, Andrew ...
Ray Dalio On How To Run A Meeting & Other Business Tactics
Reading a book is easy. It’s much harder to take what’s in the book and incorporate it into our lives ...
Ray Dalio’s 4 Steps to Better Decisions
In a previous post, I described Ray Dalio’s Truth Machine and formula for a good life. For those who haven’t ...
Ray Dalio’s Secret Sauce – The Truth Machine and The Good Life
Ray Dalio has written a book titled Principles. The book is over 500 pages. It’s mostly words, and there are no ...
Passion is Bullshit – Cal Newport on Finding Work You Love
Once upon a time, my job was to sell bonds. I didn’t like my job. I spent a lot of ...
I Is Not Enough – Amartya Sen on the Utility and Moral Dimension of Thinking Beyond Ourselves
One of the reasons for this blog is to share different frameworks of thought that I’ve found helpful or interesting ...
My Favorite Tools For Escaping Social Media and Taking Back Attention
Social media is addictive. That it’s addictive is not an accident: Social media is built to be addictive. In the ...