David Pennington

We should all want to cultivate a thirty second mind that can absorb the essence of a problem and come up with insights based on deep fluency with how the world works. However, a different type of “thirty second mind” is far more common today. Nearly thirty years after the internet became mainstream, the majority of people in our society have... See more

You might think of this chart as the shape of attention. After clicking to start, thousands rapidly exited, some immediately, some after a minute or two. But if you could make it past three minutes, you were more likely to finish than to give up. And once you hit five minutes, your odds of completing the exercise were very high. A quarter who... See more

When I had the flip phone, I had to put in effort to get to places, to talk to people. Everything was a task. Now it’s easy to do things. I guess I still don’t like needing the crutch of a smartphone, though I couldn’t figure out how to go on without one.”

In every organisation, whether in the public or private sector, a great inversion has taken place where the people who do actual, useful work (from surgeons to call-centre staff) find themselves working at the behest of a vast army of box-tickers and pen-pushers who demand that they must conform to a host of metrics and proxy targets so their... See more

Mastery is fine, but you must retain the ability to think like a beginner.