Seth Godin just made a great point on the value of cutting away the empty calories in your writing. I'm quite partial to the advice in On Writing Well in this arena too. But these rules are easy to forget, and often hard to spot when you'
There's a great line in Maciej Ceglowski's excellent "Haunted by Data" talk about the conundrum between good data and good algorithms: "There's a little bit of a con going on here. On the data side, they tell you to collect all
There's this great section in It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work where the authors reference a technique from Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly of Apple France: "When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says '
I was driving in a heavy rainstorm during the day recently. It was just light enough out that my automatic headlight sensor didn't turn on. But it's one of those cases where my headlights are still essential, more to be seen than to help my own
I read and listened to a lot of great stuff this year - books, articles, and podcasts. But when I think about the best of the year, these titles come to mind: The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday - This book came to me at exactly the right time
In perfect and consistent conditions, forming a new habit is pretty straightforward. If you lay out running shoes and clothes the night before, you're much more likely to follow through with that morning jog. But what happens on the day when it's pouring rain? The days
This has been a year of a lot of change and growth for me, and the moves I've made have been thanks to the direct or indirect actions of others. It seems only fair to reflect on some of the big events for me this year and the
We shouldn't be so surprised when our forecasts are off. Especially when we try to look too far in the future. The meteorologist limits their weather forecast to ten days or so for a reason. Things are just too hard to predict accurately beyond that. The further out
Wow this has been the year of podcasts for me. I've had three in the past two months, and a few earlier in the year. While the latest interview certainly covers some familiar ground, it's a good discussion of integration, both in terms of technology, and
As the year closes it's easy to look at the coming twelve months as a reset to do better, improve ourselves, ditch bad habits and create new ones. But too often our approach to resolution making is one of sheer force of will - and invariably our habits,
We recently made a pasta dish that my sister recommended to us. She warned us, "Don't use all the black pepper in the recipe. It's way too much" But we decided to try the recipe as is. Certainly that's the way the
Most construction lumber is made out of softwood. Fir, pine, wood from trees that don't lose their leaves. It's plentiful, fast growing, cheap, and easy to work with. But it's relatively soft and weak. Hardwood is from deciduous trees: walnut, oak, maple, etc. These