Reading Time: < 1 minKevin Kelly’s “Excellent Advice for Living” has a lot of great thoughts in it, and I really liked this one: If you think that something “goes without saying,” it is usually best for everyone if you just go ahead and say it. This made me think of two things. First, it should always be done […]
General
9/11 caused 1,600 automobile fatalities
Reading Time: 2 minHumans are bad at understanding risk. We’re all a bit scared of mass shootings, but they only account for 0.1% of firearm fatalities in a year. Or as I shared a few years ago, the full list of what we’re scared of (and is shared by the news) is vastly different from what’s actually likely […]
Values without expression are dead
Reading Time: < 1 minI was talking to someone a few weeks ago and they mentioned that they “never take a stance on social issues”. While it can make sense for a business to stay neutral at times, it was interesting that they personally didn’t take a stance on anything. Further, it wasn’t just a lack of a public […]
The key is not the will to win
Reading Time: 2 minA few days ago I shared that fantastic video from Bill Gurley, and I wanted to share one more quote from it. Much of the video discussed the late Bobby Knight, including this quote that stood out to me: “The key is not the will to win… everybody has that. It is the will to […]
Wanting to attend a better school is almost as good as getting into one
Reading Time: 2 minIn reading the book “Freakonomics“, there were a lot of fascinated studies citied and this one really caught my eye. When Chicago Public Schools opened a lottery for students to apply to get into better schools, some students got selected and some didn’t. However, the main difference for the students ended up being that the […]
Do you think the world is good?
Reading Time: 2 minIt’s amazing to me how differently people see the world. Some look for the best in things, and some look for the worst. From a statistical point of view, the world is way better than most people tend to believe. There are certainly many problems to be solved, but we’ve never had a better place […]
The Muse sees the butt in the chair
Reading Time: < 1 minWriting daily can be tough. I’m about three years into daily blogging, and I still struggle quite a bit. The difference now is that I don’t wait to be inspired. Prior to 2020, I’d post “when I felt inspired”. This led to 14 posts in 2019, 9 in 2018, and similar numbers going back to […]
Urgency is the opposite of hurrying
Reading Time: < 1 minUrgency and hurry can sound like doing the same thing, but deep down they’re quite different. A good example of this came from a post I shared earlier this year when I explained how calm can be faster. If your child falls and hurts themselves, you need to urgently get to the situation but if […]
Degree of difficulty doesn’t count
Reading Time: 2 minIf you’re an Olympic-level diver, the “degree of difficulty” on your dives is very important. For the rest of us, not so much. When it comes to something like building a website, you can choose to use a tool like WordPress (like we do) to help with the basics, or you can choose to write […]
Your call is monitored
Reading Time: 2 minBack in the day when calling a company you’d often hear a messaging saying that “your call may be monitored”, which I suspect was true. We hear the same thing on those calls today, but it’s a lie — your call absolutely is being recorded and studied (and with AI, even moreso). As Seth Godin […]