To begin honing your intuition, you can ask one trigger question and one confirmation question about each aspect.

we’re not looking to learn what it takes for “anyone” to do their best work. Instead, we’ll focus on a much more important question: how can you start doing yours?

Because it’s not enough to understand yourself. You have to understand your audience too. That’s the next part of our context to understand.

“How might I expand upon what I’ve learned?”

“Every context is slightly different,” he told me. “History rhymes; it doesn’t repeat. So you have to be able to walk into a new context, put your experience aside for a bit, and understand what’s different.”

It’s one thing to question a best practice in our minds. It’s an entirely different matter to act on it.

The answer is always the same: it depends.

On the Drift website, readers still saw an option to subscribe, but it was no longer required. At the bottom of each piece they publish, Drift places a single line of copy that reads, “P.S. Can we send you an email? Once a week or so we send an email with our best content. We never bug you; we just send you our latest piece of content.”

we start to doubt our ability to deliver. We struggle with learned helplessness, and we inform our decisions using generalized advice or past precedents rather than our own investigation of the world around us.