Category: Life
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The squeeze
Whether it’s rising Uber rates, declining organic reach at Facebook, Netflix cracking down on shared passwords, companies are squeezing now. They do this because they believe they don’t have to worry about customers leaving; people are too used to the service and will endure the new terms, increased prices, or lowered surplus benefits. You can…
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Obviousness fallacy
Obviousness fallacy is the notion that the options that are most convenient, most popular, and most easy to understand and manage, are the best ones. By extension, the less convenient, less popular, and less visible options seem riskier, require more effort, and are just generally lower quality in some way. One example of obviousness fallacy…
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Permission: To wait, or not to wait?
Generally, if you wait around for permission to change in your professional career, to start a creative project, or to improve yourself in some way, you’re going to be waiting a long time. It’s better to try to make a change today, as soon as you can—even now, if possible. The adage, “Ask forgiveness, not…
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Montage fallacy
The training montage of Rocky was the most outstanding part of the story to me. It was inspiring to watch Rocky’s personal transformation, from a bum to a champion, effectively take place in several minutes. This kind of montage is a common element in all sorts of movies. It’s an incredibly boring part of the…
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Stick to the whim
In the early 2010s, after watching the film Pariah, fashion designer and lawyer Busayo Olupona felt an inner call to connect with actor Adepero Oduye and introduce her eponymous emerging fashion line, Busayo. Perhaps, Olupona thought, there might be an opportunity to style Oduye for a future work. The two of them connected on Facebook,…
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Advice for considering advice
Advice is a genre that should probably be treated more like fiction than non-fiction. Because so much content that’s packaged as advice is more like entertainment or remixed clichés—with little lived experiences, or introspective reflections, to support it—it’s best to read most advice with the seriousness you would a fictional story or a horoscope. Take…
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A trustworthy expert’s tone
It’s in an expert’s interest to make the case that they can add value to you and your work. That usually means that you need to believe you’re not doing something right. The next time you experience doubt after hearing an expert’s claims, just remember that they’re incentivized to make you feel that way. It…
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Points for pointedness
Matt Galligan said to me, nearly a decade ago, “When you ask pointed questions, you can get real answers. It is so much easier for me to knock out an email with a thoughtful response when a question is asked.” Make the question direct, to the point, and easy for the other person to respond…
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A ladder of independence
Almost a year ago, I wrote about the importance of finding ladders to help structure your work. I just found a good one, “The Spectrum of Financial Dependence and Independence,” by Morgan Housel. There are 16 levels of independence, with clear definitions. I appreciate it because it’s much more flexible than what the typical label…
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Serious possibilism
People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly…