Student of Life
We will give you suggestions for tailoring you ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose. But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach [...]
Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive. Let’s look at a few examples: Happiness The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them. That definition skews [...]
Intelligence is about building up continually improving mental models of the world and correcting false assumptions as you find them. As you have more models and modules you can solve more problems and understand more things. For example, when you can cross pollinate modules from psychology to shed new light on business problems. Some people [...]
I haven’t been writing much lately. Building my public voice hasn’t been a priority. But I thought I’d share this email I wrote, (lightly edited). The ideas in this post strongly reference the lean startup theory. If you don’t know much about that, this post might be a bit confusing. …This also inspired me to [...]
I defined 5 steps in the entrepreneurial journey that I think most people go through. The distribution is a pyramid and only a small percentage of people make it through each stage. (1) No Desire —intrinsic motivation suppressed (usually by the school system) (2) Desire to make an impact and be entrepreneurial, but uncertainty about [...]
The T Model is a framework I made to describe how to most effectively approach learning, work, and non-linear career progression. In the T Model you alternate between a broad, horizontal phase and a deep, vertical phase, (though it’s actually an upside-down T because starting with the horizontal phase is a must) . In the [...]
This blog post started as a comment on Ben Casnocha’s post on passion and voice. Most of my blog posts recently have come as a result of something provocative coming into my environment, a conversation, an idea, a quote, and unplanned, I end up writing. I’m not allocating much time to write these days, but [...]
Spend 80% of your time on your passions, improving your core skills. There are plenty of things you can find that simply meet the “interesting” criteria. The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find [...]
I started to write a comment on Cal Newport’s provocative post on whether a remarkable life requires courage or effort?…and while I tried to formulate my opinion on the matter while brushing my teeth enough thoughts broke through my conflicted un-opinionated state to warrant the comment stand-alone status: The process that I have seen work [...]
Desmond Tutu: If a young man says to you, sir Richard, if I want to be successful what must I do? Branson: You must realize that money is not the definition of success, you want to get involved with whatever interests you in life and try to do it the best you can, it may [...]
