Two weeks ago I wrote about the virtue of being a geek. I explained that it wasn’t enough to be good at something, or be passionate about it. What really mattered was finding those peculiar areas that you were good at, interested in and most people didn’t care about. These are the areas where competition […]
Why You Should Be a Geek
Several weeks ago I had the privilege of hearing an unusual motivational speech. It wasn’t in a seminar, but in a computer science class. The speaker wasn’t Tony Robbins, but a professor Michael Zapp. Zapp interrupted a lecture on heap-sorting to share a valuable life lesson: the virtue of being a geek. Geeks are people […]
Are You a Maximizer or a Simplifier?
I feel there are two main strategies to get more from life: maximizing and simplifying. Although you can do both, it seems that most people tend to pick on strategy or the other. Both of these strategies work, but I think they produce different outlooks on the same challenges. Maximizers tend to solve problems by […]
Should You Work on Your Strengths or Weaknesses?
A recently popular subject in the self-improvement genre is focusing on your strengths. The idea is that a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, therefore you should ignore your weaknesses and build on your strengths. If you’re good at history and bad at chemistry, the supporters argue, you should focus on becoming the best historian […]