Table of Contents You Can’t Self-Discipline Your Way Out of Depression Depression for Non-depressed Weirdos The Mental Health Pandemic is Inevitable Wear and Tear Take a Toll Climbing Out of the Black Hole No, New York Times, you can’t self-discipline yourself out of depression Dear readers: are you ready for peak “draw the rest of…
Table of Contents Why We’re Obsessed With Consistency The Flipside of Consistency: You Can’t Simultaneously Be in the Middle of Something and Have Perspective of It The Psychologically Rich Life To Avoid Going Crazy, We Can Either Accept What Is or Change It Dear readers: it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything online. And…
While speaking to Congress in February 1981, Ronald Reagan used this example to explain the national debt, $14.3 trillion: “If you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only 4 inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.” Reagan was known as…
Table of Contents Steve Jobs: Not a Simpleton The Intelligence of Simplicity Why We Like Other People: The Art of Reinforcement Presenting complex, detailed numbers prevents your audience from seeing the big picture as quickly and clearly as possible. To illustrate: “honey, I went to the track and lost twice as much as half of…
To prevent burnout, we need to care less and have a life Table of Contents Cal Newport, Super Genius There Will Always Be Assholes Who Work Over the Weekend When only one basket holds all of your self-esteem eggs, bad things happen The real solution to burnout is to care less and have a life…
In 2020, I was living in an apartment that was two blocks away from a hospital. In Queens. New York. You know, where the pandemic basically started. COVID-related mayhem started hitting the fan in my neighborhood well before it was even on the radar of my relatives outside of the city. Three of my friends’…
Table of Contents The Power of a Lack of Mental Chatter This is Your Brain on Status The Other Marshmallow Study The Slow Suffocation of Unsolicited Advice Why Unsolicited Advice is Never Helpful Escaping the Cycle of Crumbling Confidence This is Your Brain on a Lack of Status When you’re lower on the totem pole,…
Table of Contents The Bible or Nothing Character Building: Ben Franklin and Beyond How to Sell Yourself The Industrial Revolution: The Death of Modesty Tim Ferriss and the Age of Optimization The Problem with Productivity: Birth place of the Egosystem Back to the Pilgrims How to Maximize Your Long-Term Self A brief history, up to…
Table of Contents Selection Bias The Marshmallow Test The Other Marshmallow Test When an Entire Generation Doesn’t Get the Marshmallow Selection Bias Have you ever felt cold in an office? Or noticed how many women complain about the office being chilly? That’s because the standard room temperature was devised using a 40-year-old man weighing 154…
Years ago when I started getting serious about my health, a group of top-level CrossFit athletes decided to join my gym. One night, my Crossfit coach decided to take a regular class, right next to me. I wanted to think that he looked the way he did because of his genes. (Lemme tell you, after…
Table of Contents We would all read Brad Pitt’s dating book “Don’t complicate things” say rich white men whose assistants are probably writing the books Why the simplicity of privilege makes us feel like crap UPDATE: A talk of this is available here. We would all read Brad Pitt’s dating book Imagine, if you will,…
Table of Contents Everything in life is a good news/bad news story How you pay attention to anything is how you view everything Optimism is a superpower Attitudes are contagious What if this all sounds like privileged bullshit tl;dr Here’s a money quote from Gordon Livingston’s book Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, which I…
This interview with Devon Price is the best that I’ve read in a while. Price, the author of Laziness Does Not Exist, started rethinking their entire view of productivity after reflecting on their pet chinchilla, Dumptruck. “He’s never been productive in his life… So I think animals help us remember that we shouldn’t have to…
Table of Contents My Insomnia Huberman Podcast: Bro Science with a Ph.D. How Bro Science Usually Starts The Funny Thing About His Recommendations We should all be freezing What my doctor recommended that actually worked The Medicalization of Everything Ignoring What’s Really Hard n.b. This starts with a personal story that helps illustrate the problems…
Table of Contents Where Our Hunches Actually Come From The Mere Exposure Effect Fluency Change is Harder Than We Realize Confirmation Bias and Commitment “Laziness is built deep into our brains.” – Daniel Kahneman Where Our Hunches Actually Come From Let’s say that we’re trying to select a movie for the night with our friend/family/partner.…
Before After
You are a real estate agent and a master of human behavior. I am looking to buy a house from a couple in their 90s, Paul and Caroline White, who have lived in the house for decades. They love the house, which was a boarding house during the Great Depression, and are very emotionally attached.…
A lack of mental chatter Working with Chip Heath was the most eye-opening work experience of my life. Period. Why? You don’t get to see what life is like behind the curtain for someone else very often (if ever), and over the course of our years of group calls, I saw him unencumbered by having…
It’s hard not to talk about complexity or systems without sounding like you just came back from Burning Man: “Everything is connected!! IT’S ALL ABOUT ENERGY!!!” And yet… IT’S ALL ABOUT ENERGY! EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED! WE’RE ALL JUST FLOATING PARTICLES MADE OF STARS! I love data. I make a portion of my living teaching people…
My book contains an obscene amount of references. What can I say? I love learning. Because of the replication crisis in psychology, I didn’t want to write about a study or line of research, only to later discover that it wasn’t actually valid. Here are some books that I repeatedly turned to (to view, the…
I have ADD. Bad. One coping mechanism that’s served me well, professionally, is to research and start using new tools. Thanks to 20 years of “maybe there’s a better way to store recipes” and reading Hacker News (my username is over 12 years old!), I have quite the collection. Here’s a collection of where I’ve…
Depression cuts down on your connections – makes you less lucky over time
AI will never replace human creativity. https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average The big bonus of viewing numbers as pieces of information in need of translation is shifting the responsibility. Seeing Like a Data Structure