Around the web

Launching a new local service business overnight with Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)

Normally if you want to use direct mail to advertise, you need a list of customers and their addresses. But EDDM (which is a relatively new offering from USPS) allows you to target specific neighborhoods for CHEAP.

Harsh truths that will make you a better person

The world only cares about what it can get from you.

Draw the box smaller

If you’ve got big ideas and can’t seem to get people to buy in, it might not be your idea. Change how you communicate about it.

The opportunity you’ve been waiting for

Smart companies hire people who are passionate about what they do and determined to work there.

Tim Urban on validation

Remember that almost all creative journeys start lonely, supported only by a burning internal belief.

Aaron Swartz’s How to: Be more productive

It almost seems like common sense. But society’s conception of work has pushed us in the opposite direction. If we want to be more productive, all we need to do is turn around.

Natural technique doesn’t exist

If there are people who are playing at a different level than you who are embracing an approach that feels unnatural to you, you may have found the technique that you’ve been missing.

Optimal Overhead

Make sure you are at least no less productive with overhead than you were without it.

Social exploration: When people deviate from options explored by others

People are more likely to explore unknown options when they learn about known options from other people’s experiences.

Compress to impress

Encode important strategies in very concise and memorable forms.

Shooting and Storming Of The US Capitol In Washington DC

View Discretion Is Advised

Homesteading Mental Models

Never get tired of repeating your best ideas.

How to instantly show your value

Boilerplate advice

If this feels revelatory to you, you may have a bigger problem of insufficient real mentors in your life.

Why top entrepreneurs invest in executive coaching

Leaders cannot see what’s right in front of them (the best ones admit it).

Why isn‘t there a line at the library?

We can refuse to be brainwashed into accepting the status quo, and we can commit to finding the others, engaging with them and leveling up.

A reminder from Beeple

Fuck all of your excuses. Sit the fuck down and do your work.

Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago

Remember Aaron Swartz.

Whose Life Are You Living?

Are you letting life happen to you?

No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees

Gumroad Founder & CEO on how they work.

Microsimulation of Traffic Flow

See what happens when you merely lower politeness.

10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade

Take compounding seriously, develop taste, sequence things well, see what others see, make and execute decisions quickly, spot a convex or concave world, tell stories, dive into the source, be specific, see systems.

Getting Rich: from Zero to Hero in One Blog Post

A rant from Mr. Money Mustache.

What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

Beware of the curse of knowledge, focus on the fundamentals, simplicity, seek first to understand, beware of lock-in, and be honest and acknowledge when you don’t fit the role.

How to present to executives

Send an early draft to an executive attending the meeting and ask them what to change. If you listen to and apply that feedback, you'll figure out the other pieces as you go.

Steve Jobs: We don’t ship junk

Steve Jobs responds to a question from Molly Wood of CNET and Buzz Out Loud Podcast. Steve's answer defines Apple's product strategy.

Time of Our Lives: Songs from EVERY YEAR (1970-2020) DJ Earworm

A trip through time with one song representing each year from 1970 to 2020.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice

Alexey Guzey asks a lot of people about their life plans. At least half of them say that they have no idea where to move and are just coasting along, not sure what to do next. Therefore, this post.

Things you’re allowed to do

A list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you couldn’t, or didn’t even know you could.

Great minds might not think alike

Fostering mutual understanding is really important for social cohesion and for truth-seeking. Doing this between two people who have similar thought patterns is relatively easy. Helping Republicans understand Democrats, economic elites understand middle-Americans, Shors understand Constances — that is hard. For that, you might just need a translator.

Meditation Tips for a Lifetime of Practice

Whether you’re brand new to meditation, or you’re interested in kick-starting your existing practice, I hope this post will have something helpful for you.

How James Clear runs his business

“2020 was my 10th year as an entrepreneur. Here are some ‘rules’ I try to follow after a decade of stumbling around building my company.”

Studio Ghibli scene photos

Over 1,000 photos from Studio Ghibli films.

100 Ways To Live Better

Meta, mind, body, stuff, place, the soul, career, and relationships.

“Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

It’s not a real explanation, so much as a curiosity-stopper. You don’t actually know anything more than you knew before I said the magic word. But you turn away, satisfied that nothing unusual is going on. Because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious.

The Anti-Calculator

This is calculating thought, always seeking what it thinks is a solution to a problem. Even the present itself is viewed merely as a trampoline toward a better result.

The Zen of Archery - you hit the target when you stop trying to hit the target

All content is content about the content of content. It is all the equivalent of a behind the scenes DVD extra for a film that doesn’t exist because the crew were all busy making the DVD extra instead.

Reasons You Aren't Updating Your Personal Site

Tips and strategies to painlessly manage a personal website.

The Ultimate 80s Medley

Van Halen, A-Ha, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, etc.

Your Job is to Make Art

Seth Godin at ConvertKit Craft & Commerce 2017

You Will Never Do Anything Remarkable

Signaling as a Service

You are engaging in a constant battle for attention and status.

When None Dare Urge Restraint

Everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.

Stranger Than History

“I wonder if one could describe in enough detail a fictional story of an alternative reality, a reality that our ancestors could not distinguish from the truth, in order to make it very clear how surprising the truth turned out to be.”

The Virtue of Narrowness

What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.

Original Seeing

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

Do We Believe Everything We're Told?

Be more careful when you expose yourselves to unreliable information, especially if you’re doing something else at the time. Be careful when you glance at that newspaper in the supermarket.

Dark Side Epistemology

If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy. The dangerous thing is to have a false belief that you believe should be protected as a belief—a belief-in-belief, whether or not accompanied by actual belief.

100 Tips for a Better Life

100 Tips for a Better Life — from LessWrong.

The Least Convenient Possible World

Always have a plan for what you would do in the least convenient possible world.

Correspondence Bias

The tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.

The Gap Between Having Good Taste and Doing Good Work

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there exists a gap between our work and our ambitions.

Trends #0045 — Paid CommunitiesTrends #0045 — Paid Communities

Paid communities use strategic friction to build high-signal environments. Members are invested and engaged.

The Big Here and Long Now

Brian Eno on the Long Now.

The medical test paradox: Can redesigning Bayes rule help?

3blue1brown video about Likelihood Ratios, also sometimes called Bayes Factors.

The Fallacy of Gray

Everything is shades of gray, but there are shades of gray so light as to be very nearly white, and shades of gray so dark as to be very nearly black. Or even if not, we can still compare shades, and say “it is darker” or “it is lighter.”

Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health. I propose six significant levels of pace and size in a robust and adaptable civilization.

Pursuits of curiosity

In modern conversation, curiosity is forced to take a bit of a back seat. Make places consciously designed to arouse curiosity.

Notes on The Case Against Education

Education works by resorting to signaling.

Creator hierarchy of needs

Publish, grow, monotize.

The Data-Driven Life

What happens when technology can analyze every quotidian thing that happened to you today.

Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement

A post by Gwern. A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.

Who Americans spend their time with, by age

In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone.

Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement

A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.

“Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

Just because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious. Consider the consequences if you permit “Someone else knows the answer” to function as a curiosity-stopper.

Explain, worship, or ignore?

Select your option wisely.

Read the sequences

Rationality: From AI to Zombies.

How to kill the university

We need a better way to build and grow this super-community of communities.

Gwern Tea Reviews

Teas with reviews and future purchases; focused primarily on oolongs and greens. Plus experiments on water.

Hiroshi Yoshimura-Green (1986)

Lovely Japanese minimal ambient album.

Brick by brick — Will Smith

You don't say “I'm gonna make this build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built,” you don't start there. You say I’m gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid—there will not be one brick on the face of the earth that’s gonna be laid better than this brick. And you do that every single day.

How to build great products

Categorize features into three buckets: gamechangers, showstoppers, and distractions.

Happiness by Steve Cutts

The story of a rodent’s unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment.

Mark Osborne’s MORE

A stop-motion mixed-media short film that tells the story of an old, tired inventor as he struggles through joyless life in a drab and passionless society.

Follow Your Curiosity. Read Your Ass Off.

What’s important is the methodology: read your fucking ass off.

A place to write

The patterns matter. Streaks work. All part of your practice.

Mimicry vs Reflexivity

Reflexivity builds a positive feedback loop between perception and reality, and Mimicry breaks it.

Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You Do It, Exactly?

What earned secrets do you have that you can pour into thought leadership content?

202 Nietzsche on Truth and Lie (1991)

Saving for later

Earnestness

Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship between intellectual curiosity and money?

The Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery

Examples of traditional wood joineries which are still used today.

The Good Life Handbook by Epictetus

A book summary of The Good Life Handbook by Epictetus.

The Future of Agencies

Part of the Agency Acceleration Series hosted by SharpSpring, Seth Godin presents about his thoughts on the future of agencies.

How to Create Ridiculously Good Content

Part of the Agency Acceleration Series hosted by SharpSpring, Ann Handley presents how agencies can create ridiculously good content.

Positioning Your Agency

Part of the Agency Acceleration Series hosted by SharpSpring, David C. Baker presents a 15-minute session about how to position your agency

Networks and Power

A talk by Niall Ferguson on overcoming the tyranny of the now.

Three Cheers for Solutionism?

America’s COVID-19 experience also illustrates the need for indirect ways of modifying the structure of our problem even if we find ourselves constrained in attacking it more directly.

Why not seo and…?

SEO works best when it’s combined with other kinds of marketing.

This is real. That’s not.

You are not magically exempt from the possibility of ending up on the street.

Up and down the ladder of abstraction

A technique for thinking explicitly about these levels so you can move among them consciously and confidently.

How to achieve ultimate blog success in one easy step

Always Be Jabbing. Always Be Shipping. Always Be Firing. Pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it.

How to read a book

How you can learn the most from a book — or any other piece of writing — when you're reading for information, rather than for pleasure.

Don’t call yourself a programmer

And other career advice from Patio11.

Becoming a Better Ancestor

A talk by Roman Krznaric on overcoming the tyranny of the now.

Seeing Whole Systems

A talk by Nicky Case on how to finesse complexity.

Why Correct Isn’t Useful

The difference between should and how.

Pain is not the unit of Effort

If it hurts, you're probably doing it wrong.

How Are You Doing?

A tough time can make it difficult to determine just how tough a time you’re having.

Hire people who give a shit.

A simple formula for success.

Introduction to Git and Github

I’ll understand one day.

Blogging vs. blog setups

A webcomic about computers and uncertainty.

How to Think for Yourself

Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?

Digital Tools I Wish Existed

The core issue is an extraordinarily high level of friction in the process of finding, organizing, and sharing digital content.

All our selves in one basket

How society limits both individual and community self-expression both online and offline.

We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death

we will remain the burnout generation.

Technical debt as a lack of understanding

Knowledge needs reorganizing to reflect the current understanding.

In Praise of the Gods

What the rationalistic world forgot.

The Big Lessons From History

The same story, again and again.

Simple explanations

How do you write simple explanations without sounding condescending?

I attempted to cross an entire country in a straight line. Part 1

What would happen if you tried to walk in a completely straight line across an entire country?

Raising Baby Grey, a Gender-Neutral Child

Meet a Bronx couple who are raising their child Grey in a gender-neutral way until they make a decision for themselves.

How to Be at Home (2020)

If you are, at first, really fucking anxious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe.

One Thing Leads to Another

A short film about collecting, cycling caps, art and design, personal connections and why it’s worth doing something for a long time, even if the benefits are not clear at first.

FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.

I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now.

Indi Samarajiva on living through a stupid political coup in Sri Lanka and a warning to Americans.

A digital tool checklist

Fast, ownable, good design, portable, skills learned should outlive the tool.

A hypothesis is a liability

Let your fantasies run wild. There could be gorillas hiding in there.

Being Glue

Glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills.

There's nothing ”WEIRD” about conspiracy theories

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

Lessons about the Creator Economy

Consistency, community, collaboration, diverse monetization, come for the tool—stay for the network.

Low Effort, High Impact Content

meta, surveys, collate, round-ups, refreshes, spin-off.

Vangelis

Blade Runner Soundtrack Remastered 2017.

Networking for Nerds

Project, know your ask, make it easy.

News in the age of abundance

The news is like cereal.

Trends #0040 — Digital Products

Help at scale with digital products. While divorcing your time and money.

Trends #0014 — Paid Communities

Barriers change groups, make members more engaged as they aim to justify their investments.

Your blog is not a publication

Quality and depth, not volume and breadth. Library, not publication.

Find your rat people

The people that get what you do, appreciate it, and love you for it.

tribalism

An exploration of the mechanisms that drive tribalism — and that offer a way out of it.

The incoming

Just for an hour, to turn it off. All of it. To sit alone and create the new thing, the thing worth seeking out, the thing that will cause a positive change.

Patrick McKenzie and David Perell

WoW leadership, writing online.

The Five Minute Museum

Thousands of pieces from small museums brought tos life to tell the story of human efforts.

Adam Savage’s 10 Commandments of Making

10 tips for makers of all ages and advice Adam would've given to himself if he was just starting out.

UX copy sells

When you write, you’re selling something: A story. A belief system. A product.

Woodblock Printing Process - A Japan Journey

The step-by-step process of making a woodblock prints.

Executive is not a real job, but if it were here would be its description

Convince smart people to work with you, allocate scarce resources, craft vision, break ties, curate culture, be held accountable.

How Does Do Science? │ Figuring out what's true

How we can learn about the world, how to test hypothesis, and the basics of science. What is science?

The student

Getting teachers, students, and reality on the same page.

Expecting Short Inferential Distances

A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.

Election Day 2020: René Girard, Part 2

Understanding the 2020 Election through Girard’s worldview on mimetic desire, differentiation, and scapegoating.

How to Identify Destructive Leadership Patterns

People leave managers, not companies.

And a pony at your birthday party

Many of the interactions we have that are ostensibly for us are actually for other people. Once we can see who it’s for, it’s a lot easier to do it well.

Idea of Progress

A Bibliographical Essay by Robert Nisbet

When Money Is Abundant, Knowledge Is The Real Wealth

Past a certain point, money and power are no longer the limiting factors to get what we want.

Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works

A (home) movie about how Google Search works.

Noticing and authorization

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?

Good things come to those who write

Attention is the most valuable resource.

The slippery excuse

Things are fragile, easily killed, and need only gentle encouragement to continue growing.

The Sequences

A series of posts on human rationality and irrationality in cognitive science.

The Treacherous Path to Rationality

A post about the hard path towards explicit reason.

Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent

Thinking about inbox management, RSS feeds, and email overload.

Seth Godin: writing every day

Seth Godin on David Perell’s podcast.

Facebook is censoring me and most of you too.

Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk on People, Not Algorithms.

Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify

Familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy, teams ship what they’re empowered to ship, have someone understand every piece, create environments talent never leaves, software market runs on other software, compress learning.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, this is water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life.

The Content Value Hierarchy (CVH)

The four levels of content value.

Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?

Every piece of social commentary is most likely to go to the people who need it least. Advice reversal might at least be worth considering.

Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.

Misperceiving an expanding stupidity or expanding stupidity is real and this explains it.

Beware the Casual Polymath

We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists.

The Only Way to Grow Huge

Have people recommend the product or service to other people.

Where do marketers turn for advice and inspiration?

Blogs aren’t dead, but marketers are discovering information in new ways.

How to read the news

The medium is no longer the message. The path it took to find you is the message.

From Consumer to Creator

Why you should start creating something, now.

A manifesto for small teams doing important work

It works because it’s personal.

Consumers Book

A book about the people who put stuff inside their head.

A Quarter Century of Hype

25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

The Death Of Lunch

We must re-learn the art of the proper lunch.

Be a creator, not just a consumer

Why you should write.

How To Be Successful

13 thoughts by Sam Altman about how to achieve outlier success.

The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?

You can’t suddenly change the moral value of things by calling them different names.

37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

Whatever the theory you can always be wrong.

Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell

A summary of reactionary thought.

An Unexpected Ass Kicking

With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.

All In All, Another Brick In The Motte

The motte and bailey doctrine.

Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments

“I’m pro-[topic]” doesn’t necessarily imply that you believe any empirical truths about [topic], or believe any moral principles about [topic], or even support any [topic] policies. It means you’re waving a little flag and cheering.

Casey Neistat - Thoughts on how I approach filmmaking

Expressing creativity using the most basic, accessible methods is the hardest thing to do and the purest. The very best steak houses serve their filet on a plate with nothing else. Shi*ty franchises cover theirs in sauce and other stuff to distract you from the fact that you’re eating dog food.

Proving Too Much

Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, while proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. Because you don’t need an argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in the amount of time your opponent has available.

All Debates Are Bravery Debates

There are some people who need to hear each side of the issue. And it’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it.

On Being Bipolar

Living with a mental illness means always trying to be one of the “good” sick. When you are the bad sick, you become a cautionary tale.

A Few Rules

20 solid rules.

15 Spiky point of view examples

Is your point of view spiky enough?

Spiky point of view

A spiky point of view is a perspective others can disagree with. It’s a belief you feel strongly about and are willing to advocate for. It’s your thesis about topics in your realm of expertise.

The first 1960 presidential debate

Kennedy vs. Nixon in the first debate ever to be televised.

How to be professionally visible and valued as a remote worker

Visibility doesn't just refer to things that meet the eye. Discover how to feel seen and valued within your team as a remote worker.

The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping

Repeat one-time sales until you own your time. Then go after recurring.

When feedback works

In all other situations, attempts at giving feedback end up achieving nothing.

Book summary of Zero to One

Notes on startups, or how to build the future.

Free Child

A Yes Theory Short Film.

The moral panic that ensued when bicycles gained popularity

A wonderous Twitter thread.

James Burke – Internet Knowledge

Is the internet redefining knowledge?

The polymath playbook

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

The work of a word

As a word is slapped onto a greater variety of things, it loses power.

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

Let’s un-suck your negotiation. Never give a number first, listen and repeat, and more great advice.

Just how many people do we need doing that job, anyway?

Imagine if people were working at doing literally anything else, and preferably something they truly enjoyed at that.

Pricing low-touch SaaS

How to approach pricing and packaging a new SaaS app, by example.

Meeting everyone on a new team

Whenever you have a team of fewer than 150 people, meet with them one-on-one.

When can we talk about our systems?

Changing the system changes everything.

Patrick Collison Advice

The advice he'd give past him.

Be a Great Product Leader

A strong product leader acts as a force multiplier that can help a cross-functional team of great technologies and designers do their best work.

Principles for Great Product Managers

Inspired by Principles by Ray Dalio.

Dancing with belief

Sometimes, it’s easier for people to amend their belief with one more layer of insulation than it is to acknowledge how the world is likely to work.

respecting beliefs | why we should do no such thing

No authority is beyond ridicule.

We don’t sell saddles here

A memo from Stewart Butterfield, The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behavior.

Time to get back to magic

We’d be better off saying, “I need to get back to making magic.”

Designing a culture of reinvention

Culture is the behaviors that get you promoted or get you let go.

Logic | Philosophy Tube

Start with the conclusion, work your way back, separate the inferences from the rhetoric, and figure out the unstated assumptions.

Pre-tests of your agency’s positioning

Tests to apply before you make an initial positioning decision about your agency's work.

The lost tools of learning

The sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

Memo to the modern COO

Stop seeking deniability before you seek impact.

RSA Shorts - The Attention Economy

The Royal Society of Arts commission, based on a lecture of James Williams.

The Attention Economy with James Williams

Freedom of attention in the times of digital distraction.

Kierkegaard's horror of doubt

A state of doubt – disorienting and horrifying as it could sometimes be – is the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice.

How to make friends as an adult

Be bold, take the initiative, and you’ll be surprised how many people are pleased to connect.

The liking gap in conversations

People systematically underestimate how much people like them and enjoy their company.

The paradox of articulation

To speak, it is necessary to know one’s thought. But how can we know this thought as a reality made explicit and fixed in concepts except precisely by speaking it?

To all the jobs I had before

What I’ve learned from all those jobs I had before.

Tools should not only be for experts – they should turn us into them

Tools should never make people feel “too stupid” to use them or wonder why some features are even there.

Hire slowly, grow slowly

Slow team growth can be your competitive advantage.

In Defence of the Humanities

Scholars in the humanities are the bearers of the memory of civilisation, and their role in our society is indispensable.

Six Ways to Think Long-term

The tug of war for time.

Work on what matters.

How do you work on what really matters?

Are you a marketer?

Are you hoping to make things better? Then you’re a marketer.

The lies our culture tells us about what matters

David Brooks on a better way to live.

Don't Play Yourself

Selling on value instead of price.

The Best Self-Help Books of the 21st Century

Bold claims, add to reading list.

Limitless Is A Bonkers Franchise

America is obsessed with work.

We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?

ASK HN: Hacker news discussion.

Positioning Agency Brands

Position for profit and why a narrow positioning is the most lucrative and by far the easiest to sell.

Contagious

Put dynamics in place that reinforce the ideas you’d like to see spread.

It’s not the bottom, it’s the foundation

People actually want to do a good job.

The two sides of stress: distress and eustress

Stress can be detrimental (distress) or beneficial (eustress).

“Because” vs. “and”

It’s not the line that’s causing the stress. It’s your interpretation of the line.

Polls vs the Street

Why do I never seem to meet these people on the street?

Curators Are the New Creators

The Business Model of Good Taste

Why haven't we celebrated any major achievements lately?

What will happen for future achievements?

The Startling Convexity of Expertise

Strong opinions, weakly held, are a cheap call option on information.

The Magic Email

A simple email template that you can use to raise deals from the dead.

Build a portfolio that appeals to employers.

Josh Comeau’s free book on effective portfolios.

Self-directed, project-based learning

Learning opens the door to the future we’d like to live in.

Steve Jobs Lost Interview 1990

“I should probably get going.”

Rick Steves’ The Story of Fascism

How fascism rose and then fell in Europe.

Unlimited information is transforming society

We’re just starting to understand the implications.

The Graphing Calculator story

The story of a software writer who refuses to go away.

Notes on “The Anthropology of Childhood”

Title says it all.

This video will make you angry

I watched this when it first came out in 2015.

Chief Seattle's letter to all

I came across this through The Power of Myth.

Learning gears

The three gears of learning in public.

How to create luck

Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can create luck.

How to negotiate and persuade

24 pro-tips for negotiating product decisions.

Why your present self doesn’t give a damn about your future self

How to accomplish your long-term goals.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to.

Proctoring apps subject students to unnecessary surveillance

These apps violate student privacy, negatively impact some populations, and will likely never fully stop creative students from outsmarting the system.

Soft skills are permanent skills

These permanent (soft) skills are what separates humans from machines.

Expiring vs. Permanent Skills

Expiring skills tend to get more attention. But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance.

Bayes Theorem: A Framework for Critical Thinking

Learn why we think the way we do, and how we can do better.

Polluted water popsicles

Three art students collected polluted water from all over Taiwan and turned them into popsicles.

Subscription or no subscription? That is not the question.

Is there only one business model for software, and, well, for anything now?

From education to learning

An institution can educate you. Learning can’t be done to you.

Violent communication

If “violent” means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate could indeed be called “violent communication.”

Ma

The Japanese concept of Ma is something that relates to all aspects of life.

On linear commerce

A great product needs an organic and impassioned audience. Captive audiences will need products and services tailored to their tastes.

Situational gravity

People are very good at stories. That’s our core technology. Everything else in the world, though, has no interest in them.

How to on-board yourself when you join a new team

If you wait to have information handed to you on a silver platter, it won’t happen.

Outreach Tips

Outreach tips (that are better than anything you'll find searching Google).

The job struggle answer

Only you have that data. And, the best thing you can do is believe in yourself to make that call.

Show pricing on website

If you won’t show your pricing, at least do this.

A user guide to working with you

It creates clarity on how you work—what you value, how you look at problems, what your blind spots or areas of growth are, and how to build trust with you.

Growth without goals

Long term “success” probably just comes from an emphasis on process and mindset in the present.

Print-on-demand

Why is it that the average adult doesn’t write more?

Why do we interface?

The past, present, & future of interfaces.

How to get freelance clients and keep them

A thread by Tom Hirst.

Things i don’t know as of 2018 — Dan Abramov

There is often an unrealistic expectation that an experienced engineer knows every technology in their field.

The liquid self

Social media doesn’t need to be what it has come to be.

The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom

Context with Brad Harris

Eyes light up (ELU)

You already know when people are excited to hear a story.

Don’t delegate using email

When it comes to delegation, don’t be seduced by the promise of a temporary fix to the momentary crisis of having something new to wrangle.

Ethical marketing

Ethical marketing in the GDPR, CCPA and no third-party cookies world.

Can a utility brand be an emotional brand?

An emotional tech product is a lifestyle product. It doesn’t necessarily solve a problem. It’s there for entertainment. It’s not a product that people need, it’s a product they choose.

Tools for keeping focused

Find tools, and ways of using my tools, that help you stay more focused.

Surrendering control

It's good to be half-baked.

Thiel on progress and stagnation

An organised presentation of Peter Thiel’s views on progress and stagnation

The rise of magical thinking

A video that attempts to explain the rise of QAnon, conspiracy theories, and magical thinking in America.

Summarizing books

How to distill ideas to accelerate your learning.

The law of shitty clickthroughs

First it works, and then it doesn’t.

Selling your time

When you sell your time, you’re giving away your ability to be a thoughtful, productivity-improving professional.

Ugly opportunity

It’s going to happen, and it’s best to expect it optimistically.

How to ask good questions

Some things to help you ask better questions and get the answers you want.

3 career perspectives

You never know if a good day is a good day in the moment.

The full stack startup

The old approach startups took was to sell or license their new technology to incumbents. The new, “full stack” approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses incumbents and other competitors.

Loneliness is a big problem

We're alone by default instead of together by default.

The endless doomscroller

A lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair.

Magical thinking vs. evidence seeking

A video about Trump, QAnon, and the return of magic.

Whatever scares you, go do it

Fear is just a form of excitement, and you know you should do what excites you.

Goals shape the present, not the future

Judge a goal by how well it changes your actions in the present moment.

Unlearning

When the old map is wrong, we can’t just draw a new line on it.

How to Read a Book by Charles Van Doren & Mortimer J. Adler

Actionable book summary by Ivaylo Durmonski.

Common hiring manager mistakes

If you’re just starting to think about hiring, focus on your hiring funnel first, but if you’re finding hiring to be a challenge, think through whether you’re running into one of these problems.

It’s not a problem, it’s an experience

That’s all it is: an experience, a feeling. Nothing to panic about.

Physical attractiveness bias in the legal system

In one study, the effects of physical attractiveness on judges were so influential, they fined unattractive criminals 304.88% higher than attractive criminals.

The ux of lego interface panels

Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design.

The value of spare capacity

The size of a tree depends not only on the seed, but how big is the pot you plant it in. Growth in life requires space, so why do we busy ourselves instead?

The worst tool for the job

Using the best tool for a job may slow things down. It may be “best” in a sense you don't need. The actual best tool might be relatively crude.

Introduction to screen readers using voiceover

Learn how to get started with VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader, to read and navigate web pages in this tutorial by Ethan Marcotte.

Reveal culture

Because you can tell someone to do something, but you can’t reveal someone to do something.

Showing up even when you’re not feeling it

Some days, you’re just not feeling it.

Joel Spolsky on Pricing

The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know.

Thinking for oneself

Wisdom is earned, not given. When other people give us the answer, it belongs to them and not us. While we might achieve the outcome we desire, it comes from dependence, not insight.

Where to find the hours to make it happen

The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort.

Pain vs discomfort

Is this painful, or just loud?

Goodbye Serenity by Charles Simic

I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement… It hasn’t happened to me yet.

Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

Tim Robinson on Universal Basic Income.

Google Earth Timelapse

A global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 34 years.

Akimbo S7 EP10

Seth Godin live at Catalyst 2010.

Some CSS comics

Learn about CSS features with comics by Julia Evans.

Overcoming content budget pushback

Running into budget pushback for your content marketing strategy? Listen to find out how to get buy-in by addressing ROI.

Nudge marketing: from theory to practice

Nudges are powerful influences in our everyday lives. Here's how to take nudge marketing from theory to practice.

How to find those hard-to-reach audiences

How to use SparkToro.

Lessons from Pricing Creativity

Peter Kang’s Lessons from Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns.

Catastrotivity

exurb1a on being an artist.

exurb1a on compassion

We’re clearly not going to solve the problems in the centuries ahead with compassion alone. But we could sure end the world without it.

Scenius, or communal genius

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius

Watch this movie and think only about staging

Think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are.

Debiasing

How to reduce cognitive biases in yourself and in others.

Are you present-focused or future-focused?

Everyone knows about being introverted versus extroverted, but there’s another axis that makes a much bigger difference. It’s present-focused versus future-focused.

The non-urgent advance

Not a retreat, but a chance to advance.

The four quadrants of conformism

Aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.

Temporal discounting

The battle between present and future self.

Unbundling Excel

10 years after unbundling Craigslist.

Unbundling Craigslist

Vacation rentals link gave rise to AirBnB and HomeAway, Etsy dominated the arts and crafts for sale.

The waves never stop coming

And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.

Today you, tomorrow me.

On being kind to strangers.

The story of u/SpontaneousH

Documented spiral of how little it takes to turn into a heroin addict.

The art of pricing freelance projects

By making pricing a topic of priority, you can use it to help better portray your true value to people.

Directives — part 1

Directives from Derek Sivers.

Stripe: building a developer cult

What makes Stripe a favorite of developers, the advantages of building a cult, and the how the little things add up for developers

Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists

Anyone with internet access and a sincere desire to learn can access abundant information with the click of a button.

The 4 only scalable customer-acquisition channels

Unscalable channels have their place in customer-acquisition but if you want to build growth loops, you need scale.

Entropy theory

How chaos shapes industries and creates opportunities.

Looking for a new law

Richard Feynman on the process of looking for a new law.

Start a blog

How to start a blog that changes your life by Nat Eliason.

The Freud Moment

There’s a fair amount of insight into our current moment that you can acquire by reading old books. Human psychology hasn’t changed that much.

The Wet Codebase

Sometimes there is some context that is assumed and that context actually changes but you don't realize that. And so the next generation needs to understand what exactly was traded off and why.

Commercial vulnerability

If they can find someone or something cheaper than you, they’re going to work overtime to do so.

Diamond Dallas Page

Inspiring video from 2014.

Be your own mentor

No one is coming to save you.

How do you brand yourself as a freelancer?

7 simple tips on sales.

Don't sell the design.

Don't sell the design. Sell the business impact.

Every actionable book is actually two books inside

Actionable books are books that contain techniques or approaches you may apply to your life. Here's how to read them.

Professionals, hacks, and amateurs

The differences have little to do with skill, and a lot to do with resolve and intent.

Louis Rossmann: A message to the kid who called yesterday

This is why it’s worth it.

Thread on why Steve Jobs was successful

It was because Steve used his own products and constantly—CONSTANTLY—demanded they be better. In every little way.

Steve Jobs Masterclass

A decade ago, Steve Jobs sat down at the D8 conference for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. What followed was a masterclass in both company and product management.

White space

We can use it to identify what we value and what we don’t. What we need to use, enjoy to use and look at, and what we don’t.

Theory of change

The difference between effective and ineffective people is their skill at developing a theory of change. Rest in peace Aaron.

Video games are the future of education

The potential energy of human creativity is vast. We just need to give people tools, and creation will follow.

How to understand things

Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing.

Do not remain nameless to yourself

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.

A digital garden, not a blog

The phrase “digital garden” a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.

Writing less damned code

Code that don't exist is infinitely performant and extremely easy to maintain and document. A talk by Heydon Pickering.

Sixty orbits

What happens if we start celebrating our birthdays differently?

Job interviews don’t work

Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for your needs.

Limiting beliefs

Your belief system could be the reason why you can't tackle that project or make a big career move. Learn how to overcome common limiting beliefs.

Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow

Actionable Book Summary by Ivaylo Durmonski.

Good intentions make bad roadmaps

Typical roadmaps are glorified to-do lists. They hide uncertainty and focus on output. Avoid these mistakes and make your roadmaps leaner.

Why marketing is eating the world

If you want to win in the US software market, ironically, the best thing you can for your company is to really ramp up your performance marketing knowledge.

Managing Expectation

Be proactive.

Make me think

We need to know things better if we want to be better.

Derek Sivers on The Personal MBA

Derek Sivers’ notes on The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman.

It might not be for you

A meaningful specific can’t possibly please everyone. That’s the deal.

Individualism is not independence

In america, individualism and independence are willfully conflated.

Five Ways To Prioritize Better

Those people you admire, the ones who make you wonder how on earth they accomplish so much? Those people might work more hours than you or be more talented or more passionate. Or they might not.

How to improve your abstract thinking

A short summation on how to improve your abstract thinking abilities by HN users.

Solitude and leadership

A few excerpts that resonated from the speech of the week – “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz.

Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

It sucks for everyone when a candidate is surprised with an unexpected interview.

Brand marketing vs. performance marketing

Most people want the long-term brand equity, but aren’t willing to live with the worse click-throughs or lower revenues.

Why we’re blind to probability

The idea that something can be likely and not happen, or unlikely and still happen, is one of the world’s most important tricks.

SEO statistics for 2020

Ahrefs provides a list of the most up-to-date SEO statistics.

Craft is culture

Two Truths and a Take, Season 2 Episode 23. Craft is culture. If you care about craft, you've done the hard part.

Why software is more profitable than content

Content products talk to humans, while software products talk to computers. That’s why the value of content decays faster than the value of software. And it’s also why software is the better business.

How many moons?

We assume that our neighborhood is like every neighborhood, that our situation and experience is universal.

Running like a dog

Dogs run. But they don't “go for a run.”

Lest we forget the horrors

A catalog of trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes.

The cognitive style of powerpoint

PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that's about it.

Model, document, and share

One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority.

From gut to plan: the thoughtful execution framework

Annina Koskinen presents a framework she's developed to help her teams at Spotify reach their goals and ship with impact.

Why do people buy workshop tactics when it’s availible for free?

What is the reason people buy Workshop Tactics? On the Workshop Tactics website, you’ll find 56 free product team workshop exercises. However, they aren’t unique. You’ll find them scattered around the internet and in various books. So if they are free, why do people buy the £89.99 card deck?

Successes and failures of startup content marketing

Content Marketer Dominic Kent runs through some real life examples of what has and hasn’t worked in content marketing - based on his own experience.

Growing and learning

I AM GROWING AND LEARNING

The danger of a single story

Read the full transcript of the speech “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

1968 Demo — The mother of all demos

Experience the “Mother of All Demos” presented by Doug Engelbart and team at the FJCC December 9th, 1968.

Peep Laja’s Advice to his 30-year-old self

30 bits of advice from Peep Laja, founder of CXL.

Why A-players make assertions

Assertions are the realm of professionals who navigate ambiguity and rigorous thinking.

Solving online events

Every time we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit the old way of working, and then one day we realise that it lets us do the work differently, and indeed change what the work is.

2020 Logo Trend Report

This report is an observation on the logo industry and isn’t meant as a guide for best practices.

Starting many things

By all means, find something that you can dedicate your life to, but make sure that you’re not just falling into place.

How to take smart notes

10 principles to revolutionize your note-taking and writing.

The ladders of wealth creation

A step-by-step roadmap to building wealth.

United States v. Forty Barrels & Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola

A federal suit under which the government unsuccessfully attempted to force The Coca-Cola Company to remove caffeine from its product.

Differentiation Strategy

Marketing is a game of attention. You must differentiate your company to get it, yet hardly anyone does. Here's how to do it.

The WorldWideWeb Project

A historical short presentation by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN February 1991

Why everyone always hates redesigns, even when they’re good

The strange psychology that shapes your reactions.

Remembering training wheels

Risk, doing, falling, learning, progress. They all go together.

Consider a gap year

The discomfort people feel when they consider a gap year is precisely why we ought to spend more time considering it.

Naval Ravikant & Shane Parrish notes

Notes from The Knowledge Project by Danny Miranda.

Meeting spec (doing the minimum)

Committed professionals don’t ask, “how little can I get away with?” They view the work as a chance to make a difference instead.

The six levels of interaction with a system

Non-use, Use, Monitor, Maintain, Repair, (Re)build.

Idea generation

Any time you can think of something that is possible this year and wasn’t possible last year, you should pay attention.

Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)

Aggregation Theory

The profound changes caused by the Internet are only just beginning; aggregation theory is the means.

Top 10 Articles by David Perell

David Perell’s top 10 articles.

Sell your by-products

Remember, when you make something you make something else.

Productizing A Freelancing / Consulting Business

How consultancies can get recurring revenue, deepen client relationships, and improve project outcomes by using some tactics from software companies.

What the hell is going on

In the past decade, the information environment has inverted from information scarcity to information abundance, and the effects are evident in every corner of society.

The three sides of risk

Tail-end consequences – the low-probability, high-impact events – are all that matter. Once you experience it, you’ll never think otherwise.

Conjuring Scenius

It’s time to build together. Why now is the time for communal genius, and how to create it.

The Medium Post is the Message

Two Truths and a Take, Season 2 Episode 18

Directives

A brief guide on what to do from the best in the world.

A small business isn’t simply a little version of a big business

Figure out what people need and bring it to them.

Tiny websites are great

Why building your own tiny website is a really great project that you should do.

Why bother?

Why bother building a digital garden?

Sell yourself, sell your work

If you've done great work without telling anyone you may as well not have bothered.

How To Write Great Microcopy

40 pro tips for writing microcopy.

Craft Beer, Rebranded

Evolution, revolution & creating a brand that sells more beer.

2020 Beer Branding Trends

The most important and staying beer branding and packaging trends from the last decade.

Two Words

The best way to sell to, brand, persuade, or inspire people is to condense your idea down to Two Words.

Alexander and the morning dip

A story from Alexander III’s (“the Great”) childhood.

A short history of color theory

A chapter from Programming Design Systems—a free digital book that teaches a practical introduction to the new foundations of graphic design.

Clusters

We’re all connected, but the future is local.

And when does it get boring?

No one becomes a baseball fan because they read the baseball textbook and did well on the baseball test.

You’re at a crossroad. Now what?

Instead of killing your brain with thoughts – try it. Make it. Create it. Walk it.

The Canvas Strategy

Find canvases for other people to paint on.

How to Sell a B2B Product

Six lessons in selling B2B Products

More Information as a Competitive Advantage

More information is a competitive advantage, but it’s not enough.

Two ways to predict the future

Or, shotcallers versus worldbuilders.

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, turns 68 and shares 68 bits of unsolicited advice.

The Changing World Order

An online series by Ray Dalio that studies the rise and fall of past leading empires that puts today’s economic, political, and policy situation into perspective of the big picture.

How I Built Resilience: Live With Guy and Simon Sinek

A conversation with Simon Sinek, whose books about business offer guidance to founders that is especially timely right now.

Wealth Shown to Scale

Inequality in the United States is out of control.

Minding Our Stories

Humans love stories, which makes stories a powerful medium of communication, and like all powerful things, they can be used for both good and ill.

Dear client: We need to talk

An open-letter to future clients. Let’s change the way clients see us.

It’s Time to Build

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?

The Risk of Discovery

Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky.

Being and Time

About an interesting book you probably shouldn't read.

Integrating Career and Family

Square’s Restaurant Product Lead on integrating career and family.

100 Things a Designer Should Know

Some are practical, some are poetic; all pay homage to the wonderful complexity of designing things for our fellow human beings.

250 Things an Architect Should Know

By Michael Sorkin

I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did

Accessibility or usability issues are often met with “But Google does this,” or “But Apple does this.” They get it wrong just as often as the rest of us.

Taste for Makers

Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field’s discoveries about beauty to help us in another?

The History of the URL

On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email).

The Core Ideas of Self-Improvement

What are the core concepts you need to understand if you want to improve your life?

The conversation

A short manifesto about the future of online interaction.

How to get rich without getting lucky

Naval How to Create Wealth: https://nav.al/rich

15 Customer Service Skills & How to Improve Each One

Nobody’s born with good customer service skills. But, anyone can master them. Here are step-by-step instructions to improve you or your team’s support

How To Digest Books Above Your “Level”

It’s not enough that you read a lot. To do great things, you have to read to lead.

Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash

Two Truths and a Take, Season 2 Episode 5.

Stop Stealing Dreams

Dedicated to every teacher who cares enough to change the system, and to every student brave enough to stand up and speak up.

The school where children make the rules and learn what they want to learn

The Summerhill School in England helped to pioneer the ‘free school’ philosophy, in which lessons are never mandatory and nearly every aspect of student life can be put to a vote. Centered on the belief that "if the emotions are free, the intellect looks after itself."

Costco Capitalism

How Costco can sell things for the lowest prices and step on the least amount of toes.

A day at the park

The only way a question can prove itself unworthy is by attracting a better question.

You're the only one who has heard all of it

Tell us what we need to know. Not because you need to hear yourself repeat it, but because you believe we need to hear it.

Web Design: The First 100 Years

However much we insist that it will get swept away by a new generation of better technology, it stubbornly refuses to go. Our industry has deep roots in the past that we should celebrate and acknowledge.

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

Your destination is the dictionary.

Educated Fools

Why democratic leaders still misunderstand the politics of social class.

How important is work?

How important should work be in your life? What kind of relationship should you have with your career? If you don’t feel like you have that, what should you do about it?

Inversion

The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You.

Things I believe

A collection of things @JanStette believes about software development.

Simple Made Easy

Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.

Information Overload is a Fake Problem

The explosion of stuff to learn hasn't been matched with the explosion of stuff online. The latter has indeed increased exponentially, but useful knowledge hasn't.

Words Are Hard

An Essay on Communicating With Non-Programmers

The Internet of Beefs

We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.

The Risks of Imitating Designs

Even great companies make mistakes. Don’t risk your UX by assuming it’s safe to follow a design pattern just because it’s used by a successful company.

The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication

The how, where, why, and when we communicate. It's all in here.

The Story of Us — Full Series

A Wait But Why series that covers approximately everything. Turns out “Us” is a big topic.

Color Theory and Contrast Ratios

Color, at its core, is a relative and personal experience.

Army leadership and the profession

Leadership is influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.

Don't Learn to Code

Avoid thinking of writing code as the goal and learn to solve problems.

Mental models for designers

Curious about product design at Dropbox? Here’s a look at tools they use for solving problems, making decisions, and communicating ideas.

Thinking about color

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment - Claude Monet

Statement of Resistance

A Powerful Statement of Resistance from a College Student on Trial in Moscow

Attachment Science

Romantic expectations are often ridiculous and unhelpful, enter attachment science.

Productivity Shame

5 strategies to end the cycle of "never enough"

Typography Books for Designers

A Review of the Best Typography Books for Designers.

Accessibility drives aesthetics

You don’t need to sacrifice aesthetics in order to be accessible.

No, Absolutely Not

What you need to build a great website is restraint.

Söhne design information

Söhne is the memory of Akzidenz-Grotesk framed through the reality of Helvetica.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

Stab a Book, the Book Won't Die

On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy.

Earth and Sun

About space and how our planet moves through it.

Examples of Nudge Theory

Examples of indirect suggestions to influence the behavior and decision making.

Three Big Things

The Most Important Forces Shaping the World.

Shape up

Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.

Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman

Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself. Caltech’s 1974 commencement address.

A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design

Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them.