When expectations are not met, great leaders do not withhold constructive criticism. They provide people with the feedback they need to make necessary adjustments. But, they do this in a thoughtful way. They’re real without being rude.
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There are few forces more powerful than incentives. Incentives drive thinking and behavior. To understand someone’s thinking, you must understand their incentives. When you encounter a behavior problem, trace the incentives and you’ll often find the root cause. Incentives are the invisible cause and behavior is the visible effect.
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I started my newsletter to create a forcing function for continuous learning. So far it’s working. In 2022, I’m going to try a few new tactics.
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At the end of the year, it’s fun to look back and see how different pieces of content performed. For the year 2021, here are the top five most popular articles and notes based on unique page views.
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It’s time for my annual prediction that I almost always get wrong.
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In this article, I review 2021 and share my priorities for 2022.
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To live the life you want, you must avoid the wrong things while you focus on the right things. The wrong things are distractions and the right things are traction.
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Liminal moments are the periods of transition we experience between tasks. These transitions of attention are dangerous. Often without you realizing it, they create uncertainty and anxiety that push you towards the false haven of distraction.
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The theory of constraints is often talked about in the context of business, but you can apply it anywhere. Think of it as a mental model for deciding what to focus on.
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First principles thinking is a powerful mental model.[1] You can use it to simplify complex problems, discover novel solutions, and learn new skills. The idea is to break something down into its basic parts, understand them, and explore different ways of putting them back together. You deconstruct so you can reconstruct.
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I’ve been a parent for three weeks, and I’m already questioning whether I can succeed at my current goals. Before I change any of my current aspirations, I’m going to implement a few time management tactics to create more room for fatherhood’s demands.
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We all live our lives according to various rules we’ve programmed into our routines. Most of the time, these rules help us. But sometimes circumstances change, and a rule starts doing more harm than good. When this happens, it’s time to unlearn it.
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Sometimes deciding not to decide is the right decision. Decisiveness doesn’t always require you to make a decision to act. It can also mean choosing to delay. What you want to avoid is the infinite deliberation that exists between these two choices. That’s no man’s land.
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I hope to expand on this concept another time. If there’s one takeaway right now, I think we should all strive to be less sensitive to the incoming and more sensitive about the outgoing.
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To maximize performance, we must learn to prioritize important tasks despite delayed gratification. One way to do this is to self-impose a technique called “temptation bundling”. With temptation bundling, you combine a task you should do with a task you want to do.
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Life is a series of treasure hunts, but it is the moral ambiguity we face along the way that unearths us.
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A common driver of irrational decision-making is “all-or-nothing” thinking. And it’s more pervasive than most people realize.
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For the last year or so, I’ve been working in public. Each week, I share what I’m working on with the world via my newsletter and podcast. Here are a few of my observations so far.
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