Almost all human accomplishments are, directly or indirectly, judged in competition with others. This is most directly true in domains such as sports or entertainment, where awards and trophies go to some, and not others. What matters here isn’t absolute performance, but relative performance. Absolute performance can often go up and up, yet because it […]

As someone who writes advice for a living, I’m always interested in the ways advice works, how it gets distorted and what the typical advice-receiver can do about it. Recently, I came across some research that suggests a new way advice-givers aren’t being totally honest with you: paternalistic advice bias. Here’s the abstract, from the […]

This is the first lesson in a four-part series on identifying rare and valuable career skills and then putting in the work to get really good at them. We’ll only be posting the first lesson to the blog, so if you want to see the rest, you’ll have to join my newsletter. This first lesson […]

One of the most influential essays for me in starting a business, was this early article by Steve Pavlina. In the essay, he argues that building a successful company comes from a combination of factors (product quality, market demand, sales copy, etc.): “And let’s say that for each factor there is a range of effectiveness […]