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“You don’t even know what hard is”
You don’t even know what hard is. You got plucked off the internet at what, 20? You just got lucky!… Good is the minimum. It’s the baseline. You have to be so much more than good. And even if you’re great and lucky, you still have to work really f–king hard! And even that is…
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Medium Day topics
Medium recently announced a call for Medium Day, which takes place August 12. When I wrote my first post for Medium, over a decade ago, I was in between graduating college and my first job at Pivotal Labs (and even tried to make Medium a part of its content strategy). I received an invitation to…
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Changing your context
Everything you experience is filtered through your mind. There’s no way to remove this filter, (nor would you want to). If you want to change your behavior, or how people perceive you, you need to embrace the art of contextualization. Reading a book, writing regularly, and identifying someone you want to be more like and…
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Contextualization
Over a decade ago, researchers ran an experiment, starting by generating hundreds of pieces of art and splitting the art into two groups (source, backup). One group was labelled as being part of a prestigious art gallery, and the other was labelled as computer generated. The researchers recruited fourteen student subjects, scanned their brains with…
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Marketplace of truths
“Language is also clearly crucial for a special kind of abstract thinking that requires what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls ‘scaffolding’—chains of reasoning so complex that we need external placeholders to keep us from forgetting where we are,” writes Edward Slingerland in Trying Not to Try (p. 60). Slingerland continues, “The sum total of these…
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Advice for high performers
If you’ve been recognized as a high performer by someone, you’ll probably need to learn different things than everyone else. For example, while other people can let go of their work very easily, you may have trouble doing that; you can’t stop thinking about it when you get home. This might be fine in your…
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Ironic effects
A few weeks ago, Jaylen Brown said this after winning three games in a row and on the verge of a historic playoffs moment. He pointed out how his team almost fumbled the game. “I guess I’m not sure why we do it. It seems like when we get in those moments, we get a…
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Free lunch
If you’re eating a lunch you didn’t pay for, you’ve exchanged something for it. Your time. Your energy. Your presence. Your compliance. Your opinions. Etc. Was it worth it?
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On first principles
In Trying Not to Try, Edward Slingerland writes: René Descartes, in his Meditations (1641), famously declared that you can’t accept as reliable knowledge what you’ve been taught in school. The only way to obtain true knowledge, he argued, is to acquire it yourself, building up logically from first principles. This is a seductive idea, and…
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Paper happy
A paper gain is an, “Unrealized capital gain (loss) on securities held in a portfolio based on a comparison of current market price to original cost.” For example, if you bought a share of stock for $20 and it rose to $25, you’ll have $5 in paper gains. If you sell your share of stock…