Johanna

First-level thinking looks similar. Everyone reaches the same conclusions. This is where things get interesting. The road to out-thinking people can’t come from first-order thinking. It must come from second-order thinking. Extraordinary performance comes from seeing things that other people can’t see.

A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing.

If the authors use Twitter and the news media to promote their work, doesn’t that suggest they’re inviting public discourse about their research? Not sure I have any good answers for this. Maybe sharing stories of errors uncorrected isn’t the right approach. I’m willing to try any other approach offered to help fix our current poor practices of... See more

Progress doesn’t happen automatically when the scientific or technical prerequisites for it are in place. It only happens when people work on it, and that almost always requires funding. As a corollary, progress can stall for lack of funding.

Finally, it’s worth considering that the biggest potential for basic income isn’t in the US but in developing countries. India has the infrastructure for a basic income: For years now, it has been building out the world's largest biometric database as a way to securely issue benefits. Tracking income is more difficult, which would render a negative... See more

No matter what, as the organization grows, people get disconnected — they have no idea what other people are working on, or what their job entails.Getting a very brief, high-level summary of what each team did last week solves these problems.

Pretty soon, it becomes surprisingly easy to fill a full work day simply responding to whatever pops up instead of intentionally working on the highest priority things. We can easily fall into the trap that I described in the intro where we outsource our prioritization with whatever comes up.Without a trusted way of saying to ourselves and our... See more

No small number of economists are hard at work studying how to bring the economy to full employment. But what these economists are forgetting is that full employment is not the same thing as full output. Ideally, we’d want to maximize what we’re getting out of the economy rather than what we’re putting into it. Full employment just means we’re... See more

This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the

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