Category: Life
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Time is not money
You make your time, then your time makes you. One of the biggest misconceptions of time is that it’s spent like money. While it’s customary for us to trade our time for money (e.g., working a job), time itself actually has few properties actually related to money. Unlike money, time is not fungible. Time can…
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Half a match
When psychology professor Lee Ross wanted to persuade his team at Stanford to recruit Amos Tversky, he used this story (via The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis): “I said, I’m going to tell you a classic Yiddish story. There’s a guy, an eligible bachelor. A happy bachelor. The matchmaker comes to him and says, ‘Listen,…
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It works for you
The emotion you’re experiencing, the block you’re feeling, the reactions and responses that emerge from your subconscious; it all works for you, for some reason. In some cases, it helps you get what you need or want. In other cases, it helps protect you from others or from yourself. It takes great discernment to know…
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30 productivity hacks
1. Start for just 15 minutes. You’re allowed to stop after. 2. If you’re nervous about writing an email but need to respond, schedule it to go out. 3. Make a decision at the end of the meeting. Don’t do in two meetings what you can do in one. 4. Do something, even if there’s…
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Throw out the instruction manual
Instructions are useful, but complicated, and incredibly frustrating, things. There’s a bit on Confucius about engaging in thought on his own for an entire day and night, and wishing instead that he’d spent that time in learning. In the chaos of the real world, it’s useful to see what people have done, but sometimes the…
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Inbounding
Is it better for you to find a new job and apply to it, or for a recruiter to come reach out to you? Is it better for you to find a new client and sell to them, or for a client to come find you? Is it better for you to reach out to…
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3 Ways to Change Your Attitude to Change Your Circumstances
Phrases like “Visualize success,” or the importance of having a “Winning attitude,” have been thrown around so much that they’ve almost become parodies for team building office culture. Because they are so cliché, and often used as an excuse for unfair situations (corporations like to distribute the book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” whenever they lay…
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Advice for yourself
Somehow, it always feels easier to solve other people’s problems. The answer is so loud, it practically hits us in the face. It’s so easy to give advice. Yet when it comes to our own… not so much. It’s difficult to come up with a plan, to see our own weaknesses, to get outside of…
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Returning the favor
Over a decade ago, Craig Miller was recruited to work at Shopify as its VP of Marketing. The problem: he had just bought a home in Toronto and his life was there, and Shopify was Ottawa-based. They were not flexible with the location, and neither was he. So he passed on the job offer. In…
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“Exaggeration with a purpose”
One of my favorite passages in The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene (recommended in this month’s Best of Books): “What we must understand about the attitude is not only how it colors our perceptions but also how it actively determines what happens to us in life—our health, our relations with people, and our…