What Not to Outsource to AI AI literacy is quickly becoming a basic professional skill. LinkedIn reports that U.S. jobs requiring AI-literacy skills grew 70% over the past year, and if you care about increasing your output or simply keeping pace professionally, learning how to use these tools is becoming less optional by the month. Somehow, we have arrived at this point without ever really figuring out social media literacy or even basic technology literacy, which is kind of insane, but I...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Resonance I'm teaching a course right now, and one of the first things I noticed was that the students seem to lock in most when I start riffing. Not when I'm reading off a slide or delivering something exactly the way I rehearsed it in my head, but when I'm actually thinking in real time. I'll make a connection I hadn't planned to make, follow an example a little further, or start working something out out loud, and you can feel the room get more attentive. I think people like watching other...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Here’s some of the most interesting psychology research published this summer that I think you will appreciate! 1. Feeling behind can make relationships more transactional In one experiment, participants imagined living on a planet where resources were distributed unequally. One group compared themselves with high-status residents; the other with low-status residents. Those made to feel relatively deprived were more likely to evaluate relationships in terms of costs and benefits and place...
22 days ago • 2 min read
The Freedom to Ruin Your Life I’ve been reading Notes from Underground, and Dostoevsky makes an argument about human nature that I find quite compelling. “Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite,...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The Cost of Integrity When the Incentive Is Wrong When I played peewee football, being late to practice was punished, but skipping practice was not. If you showed up late, you had to run. If you stayed home entirely, there was no immediate consequence. This was when I discovered incentives. The rule was meant to promote discipline, but once you were already late, the incentive was obvious: avoid practice and avoid the punishment. That example has stayed with me ever since, though until now I...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Being While Becoming I live in the future. Sometimes five minutes ahead. Sometimes five hours. Sometimes five years. My mind is constantly asking: What’s next? What will this lead to? What are the implications of this? How do I make this better? I wake up and thoughts immediately start flooding in. What should I write this week’s newsletter about? What intervention would work best with that client? What do I need to build next? Yesterday, during one of our men’s group meetings, someone shared...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Be Careful What You Wish For I have always found prayer interesting, especially as someone who is agnostic and does not believe in the literal existence of what most people call God. That may sound strange, but I still think prayer can be useful, and maybe even necessary. At its best, prayer is not merely a way to calm yourself down when life becomes difficult, although research does suggest that prayer is often connected to emotional regulation, stress, and well-being. To stop there, though,...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Use You Unfair Advantages The road less traveled is often the right road. A lot of the best things in life come from choosing the hard thing on purpose. Discipline, courage, endurance, self-respect, and confidence are usually built through discomfort, not convenience. I believe that deeply. I once ran 100 miles in 25 hours for no other reason than to prove to myself that I could do it. Training for it was a fucking grind. It kept me away from my wife, interfered with my sleep, made school...
3 months ago • 3 min read
We Can't Afford to Hang Out We Are Being Priced Out of Third Spaces One of the less discussed reasons people are socializing less is that ordinary social life has become increasingly expensive. We talk a lot about phones, social media, anxiety, dating apps, and people becoming more isolated. While all of that certainly contributes, there is another part of the story we're ignoring. People are being priced out of physical third spaces. A third space is the place you go that is not home and not...
3 months ago • 3 min read