Most career-advice today deals with matching—trying to pair people’s aptitudes and passions with specific jobs. So, the advice goes, if you’re friendly, maybe you should go in sales. Good at math? Consider engineering or science. The matching paradigm here strikes me as too optimistically egalitarian. It somehow assumes that all jobs are equally desirable, but […]
The “Single Flaw” Fallacy
A mistake I’ve made too often, is falling into “single flaw” thinking. This is where you spend time trying to find the single cause for your lack of success in some complex problem. For example, in the first couple years of trying to start a business, I was struggling to make an income. In that […]
The Skill of Trying Your Best
“As long as you tried your best,” was a phrase I’d hear as a kid. It was supposed to console you in the event of failure. Reminding you that, as long as you put your best effort in, then it didn’t matter if you lost. Hearing that phrase as an adult, I wonder how often […]
We Become the Story We Tell Ourselves
I’ve made it a habit to find out what drives someone, the first time we meet. I find that knowing this reveals more about a person than politics, religion or any of the normal things people use to distinguish themselves. At first, it surprised me how much of a person can be summarized, once you […]