A heuristic is a mental shortcut, and one of my most commonly used heuristics is to imagine the most boring, conventional, mundane version of something before making any decisions about it. When deciding on a new home base—a rental apartment,…
It’s prudent to semi-regularly ask ourselves why we do various things, and why we do them the way we do them. This isn’t a complicated concept but it can be tricky to implement productively: we humans tend to be skilled…
I don’t find regret to be particularly useful, though it’s sometimes difficult to avoid. Regret can play a role in productive reassessment, triggering the reflex to look back and consider. I find that its knee-jerk utility often stops there, however,…
The stock market, if you learn about it and look very closely, makes little sense. There are good intentions behind it, and in the abstract it’s a decent means of getting resources where they need to be while incentivizing economic…
I have a lot of very flawed systems and tools that I use on a daily basis. My calendar, for instance, serves as both a to-do list and schedule of events. It’s fine for both purposes, but not great at…
Sometimes, in some rare cases, I live up to my every expectation of myself; but almost always I fall short. This isn’t a self-criticism, it’s a reality. And it’s one that I’ve learned to accept in the same way I…
I forced myself to take ten minutes to think about difficult things, this morning. On a typical day, I set aside twenty minutes for quiet, undistracted thinking. I let my mind wander and do nothing at all, usually staring at…
Distorted, mistaken, or outright false information is as common as oxygen in our modern, interconnected communication ecosystem. It should be no surprise, then, that we inhale so much of it. This is true no matter who you are, what your…
Many ambitions require periods of soil-tilling and seed-planting if we want to make them a reality. Consistent habits can help us realize outcomes that outweigh the total aggregated inputs: our small, daily efforts transmogrify into more than the sum of…
When catching up with friends and family, of late, I’ve found myself asking how they’re doing in plague-adjusted terms, rather than in an absolute sense. I think this is only fair because, for many of us, this has not been…