Johanna

Poor people’s two largest expenses are housing and transportation.Guaranteed jobs have to be somewhere. Most of them will be in big cities, because that’s where everybody is. The ones in the country will be few and far between.That means to get to your government-mandated job, you’ll either need to live in the big city or have a car. Living in the... See more

Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.

Picking a single, lifelong career feels like an impossible task for me.As soon as I’ve gone deep into one domain, I feel compelled to explore another. Stability spawns a desire for novelty. Novelty spawns a desire for stability. The cycle goes on ad infinitum.

A great team and a great market are both critically important—you have to have both. The debate about which is more important is silly.

You cannot swap one life for that of another. But if friends are primarily attributes, then you could swap two people with the same attributes. Or even get someone else with better attributes.What you cannot do is remove someone from their web of entanglements and replace them with an identical twin. To do so would be to disrupt the networks of... See more

Smartphones provide a nearly endless stream of potential dopamine: a ‘positive social interaction’, or something resembling it, is always but a swipe away. As a result, we’re often mindlessly reaching for our phones without really knowing why and, if we cannot find our phone, we may feel a pang of anxiety.When we sit down to work, our brains don’t... See more

If you’re five or 500 people, hire as many originals as you can. Yes, there are risks of hiring too many originals — but it’s even riskier to hire too few.

“I think the idea of air taxis is kind of bullshit,” Carlo Ratti, an architect and urban theorist who serves as director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, told me. “Technology can change many things, but it cannot change physics. Helicopters are loud and expensive and, for most forms of transportation, inconvenient.” As near-silent electric and... See more