Insights

Defaulting to the benefit of the doubt by assuming positive intent, especially with the people who are close to you, can help you live more peacefully and joyfully. It’s not always the easiest thing to do. But this year, I’m aiming to create more kindness. And I’m doing it by giving the benefit of the…
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You are a jigsaw puzzle piece of a certain shape. You could change your shape to fit an existing hole in the world. That was the traditional plan. But there’s another way that can often be better for you and for the world: to grow a new puzzle around you. Grow The Puzzle Around You Cultish…
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Another insight from Mark Manson’s newsletter: Carpe diem, motherfuckers – There are a lot of side effects of deteriorating trust, but one of the more interesting ones is how a lack of trust can decrease people’s ability/desire to delay gratification. And delaying gratification is like, pretty much what makes us functional, civilized human beings. If you think…
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I enjoyed reading Mark Manson’s newsletter with the following insight: Calculating a tragedy – Josef Stalin once observed that, “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.” While dark and cynical, Stalin’s observation about human nature is fundamentally true. We attach meaning to narratives. The more people involved,…
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While there’s no magic wand that makes pain disappear, there are patterns and trends that we can harness to lessen and control the pain in our lives. Nir Eyal – We’ve Been Thinking About Pain All Wrong (Medium)

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the…
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The mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota spent much of his career at MIT, where students adored him for his engaging, passionate lectures. In 1996, Rota gave a talk entitled “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught” which contains valuable advice for getting people to pay attention to your ideas. Life Lessons From Mathematician and…
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You look at Katie and you realize the differentiator is between the ears. And their hearts. Their appetite for competition, their unwillingness to lose, and their embracing the challenge. And not just the challenge on competition day, which is a huge part, but the challenge of the training grind. How Katie Ledecky became better at…
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When we promote problem solvers, we incentivize having problems and because most organizations reward problem solvers, it can seem like a better idea to let things go wrong, then fix them after. That’s how you get visibility. You run from one high-level meeting to the next, reacting to one problem after another. It’s great to…
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When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible. The High Price of Mistrust