Agalia Tan

You have to be utterly ruthless about dodging meetings. When you do meetings, make them walking meetings. Do standing meetings. Keep them short, actionable and small.

4. Conversation allows us to think together.

Philosophy and literature encourage us to question everything and ask, in particular, the big “untimely questions.” If we enter them not with the aim to convert the other but to possibly be converted ourselves, conversations can unlock our best collective thinking and serve as the source code for... See more

To paraphrase Marx, we might hunt for jobs on LinkedIn in the morning, fish for compliments on Instagram in the afternoon, criticize each other on Twitter after dinner, and be as lascivious as we like on Tinder in the late evening, without letting any of these identities define us...  Nevertheless, something is lost in this fractionalization of the... See more

as a society, we seem to dramatically undervalue the importance of human connection as a way of understanding the world, much less centering it in our information diets.

It occurs to me, much later than it occurred to the archivists, that we have never possessed such a complete and damning record of our past interactions. I can tell you every college scholarship I never got. Every sale at The Gap for the past 18 years. Every flight I’ve ever taken, anywhere in the world. Most grocery lists, news alerts,... See more

The thing that’s vexing you: is it a situation or a problem?

Problems have solutions. If we care enough, we can find a way to solve a problem, but it might cost more money, require more effort or involve more risk than we’d prefer. If we’re ready to ease some of the constraints, that problem might go away.

Situations don’t have solutions. That’s why... See more

You can carve out a very good career simply by being the most reliable person on the team. You would not think that always showing up on time, hitting every deadline, and responding quickly and professionally to all communication would be such a differentiator, but these traits are always in short supply.