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How do we resist the pressure to follow established playbooks? How do we embrace the periods of relentless action before results? How can we navigate

Essentially, their professional lives are one giant positive-sum game, where everyone is eager to do favors for one another.

There’s only one way to start building this kind of network, which is to act with generosity towards others before you know whether it will be recipro

At the beginning of this process, it will feel artificial, like you’re socially flailing and trying too hard. Because you will be socially flailing, a

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

Rao: “Yes, because we’re obsessed with scaling before weirdness. True innovation is psychotic at first—it doesn’t appeal to the rational investor. We

Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law

People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in

"The shortest answer is doing the thing." - Ernest Hemingway Stop talking about the thing. Stop asking about the thing. Stop gathering more informati

“I don't wait for things to cross my desk. I go out and look for them. I made 250 calls a day." ​ Michael Ovitz ​

“A simple recipe for finding opportunities: Be pleasantAsk questionsEngage daily It’s hard for a warm and pleasant person who is asking a lot of

52 Things I Learned in 2024

But overall, both research efforts themselves (*cough* behavioral economics *cough*) and “debunking” efforts can be naive in this clueless way, causin

Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great que

Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

What you must do instead is realize that what you have been doing is not the problem, it’s the why. You thought that doing important or impressive wor

The greatest endemic risk to the psyche in 2021 is not that you’ll end up on the streets next week or fail to fund your retirement in 30 years. The gr