Efficiency is the Enemy
There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Imagine if you, as a budding productivity …
Systems
“Jootsing”: The Key to Creativity
Creativity can seem like a mysterious process. But many of the most creative people understand that you can actually break it down into a simple formula, involving what researcher Douglas Hofstadter …
Descriptions Aren’t Prescriptions
When we look at a representation of reality, we can choose to either see it as descriptive, meaning it tells us what the world is currently like, or as prescriptive, meaning it tells us how the world …
Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. …
Unlikely Optimism: The Conjunctive Events Bias
When certain events need to take place to achieve a desired outcome, we’re overly optimistic that those events will happen. Here’s why we should temper those expectations. *** Why are we so optimistic …
Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life
Nothing will change your future trajectory like your habits. We all have goals, big or small, things we want to achieve within a certain time frame. Maybe you want to make a million dollars by the …
Under One Roof: What Can we Learn from the Mayo Clinic?
The Mayo Clinic is one of the top-rated hospitals in the US and enjoys remarkable success. In this post, we consider the reasons for the Mayo Clinic’s success and what we can learn from it to apply to …
At Some Point, You Have to Eat The Broccoli
It’s a wonderful idea to try to find a set of systems and principles that “work better” for big swaths of your life. Better habits, better mental tendencies, better methods of …
Multiplicative Systems: Understanding The Power of Multiplying by Zero
We all learned in math class that anything times zero is zero. But if you stop thinking about the idea here, you don’t see all the practical applications that understanding multiplicative …
The Minimum Effective Dose: Why Less is More
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry *** In pharmacology, the effective dose is the …
Breakpoint: When Bigger is Not Better
Jeff Stibel’s book Breakpoint: Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain is an interesting read. The book is about …