Why is everybody so busy? Nearly a century ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted we’d only work fifteen hours a week. Incomes would grow and so would our free time. Except that hasn’t happened. Income rose, but we kept working long hours. Why? One answer is that people like to be busy. This paper […]

How can you maintain peak concentration during difficult tasks? (Besides just chugging coffee, of course.) Staying sharp can be tricky. Even when you desperately need to focus, it can be hard to stop a wandering mind. You might get stuck, unable to push past what ought to be a simple problem. Persisting through these moments […]

Last week I read John Doerr’s Measure What Matters and Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics back-to-back. Needless to say, they did not agree. Measure What Matters is a peppy business book about the importance of setting clear goals and backing them with metrics. Acronyms and buzzwords abound. These sentences, found on page 186, might […]

I admire when other authors showcase the best evidence against their position. It’s disappointing to finish a book and find the author ignored a good, well-known rebuttal. In that spirit, I want to consider some of the best arguments I’ve heard against doing the real thing. To recap my position: Most learning occurs by doing […]