Productivity

Your surface area of luck

There's some luck you can control. The harder you work, the luckier you are. The more you expose yourself to opportunity, the more lottery tickets, rolls of the dice, at-bats, or whatever other metaphor you pick, the more you have a chance at success.

August 24, 2022

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The literal textbook on how to be terrible at work

We’ve all been there, sitting in a meeting that is so awful it almost feels criminal. Nobody quite knows why they’re there. There’s no agenda or goal. Some loud-mouth jerk won’t shut up, and another prickly son-of-a-gun keeps trying to table things or nitpick on process. It turns out that they might accidentally be following the CIA's textbook on sabotage.

August 19, 2022

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Nobody tells you when things just sort-of suck

The users who viewed your website and didn’t trust it just left. The customers who saw your logo and didn’t understand it just moved on to the next company. You didn’t get an exit interview with each of them where they were interrogated on what worked and what didn’t.

August 15, 2022

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No-code is coming for us all. And that’s a good thing.

We shouldn’t all have to be programmers, but we’re in at least the third decade of pounding on the need to teach programming in schools. I think we might chasing the wrong goal here: the skill we really need to teach isn’t how to code, it’s how to figure out what to make.

April 2, 2022

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The secret to not failing in a client-based business

We all screw up, all the time. The key, as illustrated by author and artist Neil Gaiman, is that people will put up with a lot of mistakes if you’re a good person.

April 2, 2022

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Ben Guttmann