Category: Life
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J. Cole’s hard decision for an easy life
In case you’ve missed it, two of hip-hop’s biggest superstars—Drake and Kendrick Lamar—have been in conflict for the past several weeks. (There’s a Wikipedia page!) The inciting incident for this particular one was Kendrick responding to Drake and J. Cole’s song, “First Person Shooter.” While J. Cole responded with a diss, he quickly withdrew it…
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Thin rewards vs. thick rewards
When you cave in to your impulses—to check social media, to engage an overwhelming emotion, to eat delicious food of little nutritional value, to not speak up, to people please, to follow a default path, etc.—you will feel good in the moment. Unfortunately, the feeling usually disappears very quickly. These are thin rewards, and you…
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Effective first
An effective first approach prioritizes getting your work done (feeding your family, achieving your goal, helping a friend, etc.), within the boundaries of your values and ethics. When you work from a stance of effective first, you prioritize doing the real thing. You tell people about what you’re doing. Through this doing, you get the…
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“What if I’m no good?”
Let’s say you want to do something creative. You’re not sure about how good you really are, or how much money you’ll make, or whether or not you’ll “go somewhere” with it. Would you do it anyway? The answer needs to be a resounding yes. That’s the level of drive and sacrifice that it takes…
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The dirt
In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes: Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem….You can’t make good decisions with bad information. In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed.…
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Delusions and evolutionary fitness
Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler write in Useful Delusions: In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that the human brain is designed to make a number of errors in perception and judgment. These “bugs”—distortions, shortcuts and other cognitive cross-wiring—produce slanted pictures of reality. They exist for a reason: Evolution found that, on average, the…
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Change the metaphor
You and I constantly tell ourselves stories about our work, and these stories affect how we treat the work and treat the people we work with. The most important thing to remember is you always have a choice to flip the metaphor or introduce a new one. That’s a starting point for you to see…
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Big fish in a bigger pond
In Lucky Me, Rich Paul writes: Now I have to help guys in the league who used to be stars, but can’t let go of their ego and accept a new role. Then there are my young clients coming into the NBA; every one of them was once the star on their high school or…
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Dreams vs. delusions
A dream coming true is a delusion that becomes reality. A delusion is a dream that didn’t become a physical reality. (Yet!) If your delusion or dream comes true, you’ll look like a genius. Until it does though, you will experience a degree of loneliness. In other words, you can and should expect to be…
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Restraint
A few days ago, I woke up to the word, “Restraint.” I like this phrase, “If ‘the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,’ as Michael Porter famously wrote, then the essence of execution is truly not doing it.” One very tangible example comes from editing, where I learned to use rich words…