These stories have stood the test of time, and continue to be some of the most-saved, read, and shared stories on Pocket. They're just as relevant today as the day they were published.
We love to hate meetings. And with good reason — they clog up our days, making it hard to get work done in the gaps, and so many feel like a waste of time.
I was halfway through a job interview when I realized I was wrinkling my nose. I couldn't help myself.
Hey readers! Quick note before we jump in: This is a post about something I’ve been wanting to write about forever: careers.
For the longest time, I believed that there’s only one purpose of life: And that is to be happy. Right? Why else go through all the pain and hardship? It’s to achieve happiness in some way.
When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark.
Last summer, I was at the beach when I saw a plane towing a banner for Vintage seltzer, the stalwart bodega brand. Not long before that, I was accosted by photographs of Topo Chico bottles sweating so lasciviously that the pages of the magazine almost stuck together.
At the end of the 45-minute workout, my body was dripping with sweat. I felt like I'd worked really, really hard. And according to my bike, I had burned more than 700 calories. Surely I had earned an extra margarita.
I reached the breaking point, as many parents do, about two and a half months in. My newborn son, Oliver, was hitting a phase where his five senses were really coming online.
Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of ‘blue-grey’, notably used in Athena’s epithet glaukopis, her ‘grey-gleaming eyes’.
The official version of chili con carne can only be made by people from Texas.
One way to think about work-life balance is with a concept known as The Four Burners Theory. Here's how it was first explained to me: Imagine that your life is represented by a stove with four burners on it. Each burner symbolizes one major quadrant of your life.
I want to ask you a question. How many hours per day do you think? “I never thought about that.” So let me get this straight. You’re thinking all the time, and yet, you never think about how much time you spend thinking.
Your brain needs to forget in order to grow. We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit.
Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in.
That is why I recently read the The Blue Zones Solution, in which New York Times best-selling author Dan Buettner reveals the eating and living habits of the world’s longest-lived people.
In the Dubai of 2050, the world looks both instantly familiar and utterly strange.
I am arriving in Brussels. The train from London is full of the usual Chinese tourists and bored businesspeople. The city doesn’t, contrary to the impression given by CNN, resemble Kabul. Rows and rows of untouched houses scream bourgeois calm (actually, they gently whisper bourgeois calm).
Our family immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s. We left behind our friends, our family, our language, our customs and everything we knew.
Do you struggle to finish your tasks? Are you always distracted by notifications, gossiping, or anything that’s random? In that case, you and I are alike. Because focusing on a single thing is one of the hardest things at work.
Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases: Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
What’s your money strategy? Do you even have one? If not, it’s not uncommon. Until two years ago, I didn’t have a financial plan, whatsoever.
What really makes whiskey taste like whiskey? If flavor truly just came down to a simple formula of distilling ratios of grains plus time spent in a barrel, then there wouldn’t be an infinite range of tastes, profiles and qualities.
In an age of all-knowing algorithms, how do we choose not to know? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service.
If Cassidy Sokolis ever needs to wake up before 11 am, she scatters three alarm clocks throughout her bedroom. Even then, she still often sleeps through the clamor. "It's really frustrating," Sokolis, a 21-year-old junior at Northern Arizona University, tells me.
Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective. J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner.
Recently, Bic launched a campaign to “save handwriting.” Named “Fight for Your Write,” it includes a pledge to “encourage the act of handwriting” in the pledge-taker’s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the company’s ballpoints into classrooms.
If you're feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up — and have 20 minutes or so to spare before you need to be fully alert — there's something you should try. It's more effective than drinking a cup of coffee or taking a quick nap. It's drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap.
Everybody wants what feels good.
In the past, time management experts would recommend that you divide up your work into A tasks, B tasks, and C tasks. The concept was to do the A tasks first, then the B tasks, then the C tasks, when you can get to them. If priorities changed, you just changed the order of your As, Bs, and Cs.
Twelve years ago, I penned an essay for a Salon series called “To Breed or Not to Breed,” about the decision to have children or not. It began this way: “When I tell people that I’m 27, happily married and that I don’t think I ever want children, they respond one of two ways.
“Traditional approaches to staying focused don’t work for me.” “I know what I should do to be more productive, but I just don’t do it.” I hear sentences like these repeatedly from coaching clients.
Feminists who say they’re having it allby choosing to stay home.
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910) began tussling with the grandest questions of existence from an early age. As a young man, he struggled through his search for himself, learned the hard way about the moral weight of immoral motives, and confronted the meaning of human existence.
One of the most important habits that I’ve formed in my life is daily writing. Without question, writing every day has brought me many great things: A better career, fulfillment, self-improvement, and most importantly, the ability to share my ideas with you, the reader.
You can train your brain to think better. One of the best ways to do this is to expand the set of mental models you use to think. Let me explain what I mean by sharing a story about a world-class thinker.
What happens to our bodies when the bonds of love are breached. Ruth and Harold “Doc” Knapke met in elementary school. They exchanged letters during the war, when Doc was stationed in Germany. After he returned their romance began in earnest.
Dominic Tierney, a professor at Swarthmore College and the author of multiple books about how America wages war, may know the reason why.
You know, thinking, worrying, stressing, freaking out — call it whatever you want. I call it a preoccupied mind. And with what? All my life I’ve been obsessed with practical things. Practical philosophy, practical knowledge, practical books, practical work, and practical advice.
A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution. A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers.
PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe.
Over the years, I’ve adopted many different “positive” habits. To me, a habit is positive when it improves the quality of my life. A lot has been written about forming habits.
Seven in 10 Americans are disengaged from their jobs, according to Gallup. That's more than two-thirds of us who are unfulfilled by our work, just dragging our sorry selves to and from the office every day. One community has an attractive answer: just quit.
The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly.
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.
The traditional 9–5 workday is poorly structured for high productivity. Perhaps when most work was physical labor, but not in the knowledge working world we now live in.
Are you currently in a good mood or a bad mood? Now, let me ask you another question: How is your day? I bet that you’re having a bad day if you’re in a bad mood, and a good day if you’re in a good mood.
What I learned trying to keep up with my 4-year-old daughter at the royal game. My 4-year-old daughter and I were deep into a game of checkers one day about three years ago when her eye drifted to a nearby table.
Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head. One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination.
Procrastination comes in many disguises. We might resolve to tackle a task, but find endless reasons to defer it. We might prioritize things we can readily tick off our to-do list—answering emails, say—while leaving the big, complex stuff untouched for another day.
For Frank Russell, reinterpreting his schizophrenia as shamanism helped his symptoms. It starts without warning—or rather, the warnings are there, but your ability to detect them exists only in hindsight.
SYRACUSE—This office looks like a pretty typical co-working space, what with the guy with a ponytail coding in one corner, the pile of bikes clustered in another, and the minimalist desks spread across a light-filled room.
Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.
Igor Schwarzmann is the German co-founder of Third Wave, a strategy consultancy based in Berlin that works with small-scale industrial manufacturers.
That’s how long I want to live: 75 years. This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do.
Hermann Hesse wrote in his lyrical love letter to our arboreal companions, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.
If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery.
Knowing a thing means you don’t need to believe in it. Whatever can be known, or proven by logic or evidence, doesn’t need to be taken on faith.
SANTA CLARITA, California—Cesar Millan crosses the road to meet me. Two pit bulls, a Chihuahua, and a Yorkshire terrier—named Junior, Taco, Alfie and Kaley Cuoko—follow. Off leash and at heel, the dogs are calm, almost languid. If Millan communicates with them, I do not notice.
Tina was at a crossroads. Her daughter had recently left for college, and her husband had his own pursuits. And although she’d once enjoyed banking, she now bore little interest in her work. For some time, she had been asking herself whether she should quit.
On a Saturday morning in May, 2015, a group of law enforcement agents, the FBI among them, knocked on the front door of the Montgomery Homestead Inn in Damascus, Virginia. The proprietor, a retired kindergarten teacher who lives across East Laurel Ave. from the inn, happened to be there at the time.
If Dr. P. noticed, she was too busy looking at the questionnaire to let on. "Do you tend to repeat heard words, parts of words, or TV commercials?" I immediately flashed back to middle school, randomly repeating such phrases from TV as, "I don't think so, Tim," from Home Improvement.
Hogan was one of the greatest golfers of the 20th century, an accomplishment he achieved through tireless repetition. He simply loved to practice. Hogan said, “I couldn't wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls.
On public-access TV in 1985, Bernie Sanders defended an element of Fidel Castro’s regime: It was rarely mentioned that Castro provided health care to his country. Sanders grumbled that the same could not be said of then-President Reagan.
An ex-convict on how to set your mind free. With a sigh, Johnny Perez rises from his plastic chair, unfolds his lanky frame and extends his wingspan until the tips of his middle fingers graze the walls. “It was from here to here,” he says. “I know because I used to do this all the time.
Few post-9/11 security measures have proven as enduring as the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, which effectively nationalized airport security and dramatically increased screening procedures on flights.
I don’t believe every aspect of life should be optimised, every day planned out and every minute used productively. Because sometimes the unexpected, spontaneous things are what makes life worth living.
In a post last year, we laid out the human lifespan visually. By years: While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. But fuck it.
There are many creative tools a designer uses to think differently, but none is more counter-intuitive than “wrong thinking,” also called reverse thinking.
Your boss proposes a new initiative you think won’t work. Your senior colleague outlines a project timeline you think is unrealistic.
In May of 1995, Ruth Patras realized that something was wrong with her 5-week-old daughter, Ciara. Initially happy and healthy, about a month after Ciara was born, the whites of her eyes started to turn yellow. Over the next few days, the color deepened, and her appetite diminished.
On July 4, 1988, FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States. At the time, there was no top-flight professional league in the U.S., and it had been 38 years since the country had participated in a World Cup.
Steve Jobs insisted that every item on a meeting agenda have a designated person responsible for that task and any follow-up work that happened. He called that person the DRI—the Directly Responsible Individual.
It is rarely helpful to tell a shy person to “just be yourself!” Riffing on that frustrating exchange, clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen has written a book that she hopes will answer the question the anxious person usually asks in return: How?
Apps that make it easy to invade kids’ privacy are a recipe for arrested development. For the past two years, Mandie Snyder, an accountant near Spokane, Washington, has been “monitoring” her daughter.
The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock. Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker.
Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there.
It all started with an Instagram ad for a coat, the West Louis (TM) Business-Man Windproof Long Coat to be specific. It looked like a decent camel coat, not fancy but fine.
The Bag Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his "other phone," to arrange delivery of $500 in cash to a visiting recruit. The player is rated No. 1 at his position nationally and on his way into town.
In early 2009, three years prior to Taco Bell’s 50th anniversary, CEO Greg Creed was already experiencing something of a midlife crisis. “Our target audience is [customers] in their 20s. Turning 50 makes us sound old, and I didn’t want to sound old,” Creed explains.
If you think that you have to compete for better jobs or more market share, you’re as wrong as I was. The idea of competition is engraved in our minds. We believe that we have to compete for the same jobs with others. If someone has a job, that means you can’t have the same job.
Elon Musk thinks it's almost certain that we are living in a computer simulation. In short, we are characters in an advanced version of The Sims — so advanced that it creates, well, us.
Samir Soneji had no idea what he was getting into when he agreed to talk about the potential risks of vaping at the first US E-Cigarette Summit in Washington, DC this past May. His first clue was the booing.
The average Facebook user spends almost an hour on the site every day, according to data provided by the company last year. A Deloitte survey found that for many smartphone users, checking social media apps are the first thing they do in the morning – often before even getting out of bed.
Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain’s Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade’s worth of research into the ways children play.
My wife and I had 12 children over the course of 15 1/2 years. Today, our oldest is 37 and our youngest is 22. I have always had a very prosperous job and enough money to give my kids almost anything. But my wife and I decided not to.
Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
What does love mean, exactly? We have applied to it our finest definitions; we have examined its psychology and outlined it in philosophical frameworks; we have even devised a mathematical formula for attaining it.
I opened my eyes to see a clear blue sky and two men leaning over me to put a brace around my neck. I don’t know if I was already on the stretcher or if I was still on the pavement, but there are plenty of things I don’t remember. As I would later find out, I had a brain injury.
Chances are you think you’re a good listener. People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average.
There’s that project you’ve left on the backburner – the one with the deadline that’s growing uncomfortably near. And there’s the client whose phone call you really should return – the one that does nothing but complain and eat up your valuable time.
Tax Day is a horror for many procrastinators. For many people, a little procrastination isn't harmful — like 15 minutes lost in Facebook or putting off doing the laundry for a few days.
Update: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking. Get notified about book updates here (currently scheduled to come out in May, 2019).
A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.
A few months ago, my friend Tim took a new sales job at a Series C tech company that had raised over $60 million from A-list investors. He’s one of the best salespeople I know, but soon after starting, he emailed me to say he was struggling.
A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers.
How long does it take to become elite at your craft? And what do the people who master their goals do differently than the rest of us? That's what John Hayes, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to know.
There are three things, once one’s basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.
When I finally puked on the fourth night, I felt an odd sense of pride. Inside the loud, stuffy ceremony room, people were laughing, crying, chanting, gyrating, and, yes, vomiting, around me.
If you watched the Super Bowl a few months ago, you probably saw the coaches talking to each other over headsets during the game.
A year after James Cadbury, the 30-something great-great-great-grandson of the British chocolatier John Cadbury, launched his luxury cocoa startup in 2016, he introduced an avocado chocolate bar. Cadbury Jr.
As a child, I was a terrible sleeper. My parents would often find me awake at 3 AM with a flashlight under the covers reading a Hardy Boy, Nancy Drew, or Tom Swift book.
After my father died, my journey of rediscovery began with the Czech language. Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone.
Positive Alacrity is the art of creating micro-experiences that have an emotionally uplifting impact on others. But I’m getting ahead of myself … That’s a lot of people writing about and searching for something that, according to a groundbreaking Harvard study, has already been found.
Not long ago, I had the chance to speak to a networking group for job seekers over the age of 40. Many of the people in attendance had worked for over 10 years at companies and were then let go.
We all make bad decisions. Shit happens (the above examples are all about me). But the funny thing is that bad decisions never seem like bad decisions in the moment.
So you’ve maneuvered through the initial offer conversation. You’ve lined up counteroffers from other companies. Now it’s time to enter the actual negotiation. Naturally, this is the part where everything goes horribly wrong.
At whatever age smart people develop the idea that they are smart, they also tend to develop vulnerability around relinquishing that label. So the difference between telling a kid “You did a great job” and “You are smart” isn’t subtle.
You’ve probably gotten in a political argument in the recent past, whether with your nutso cousin at Thanksgiving or your militantly ignorant co-worker at a happy hour. And you’ll probably get in another political argument sometime in the near future.
There are two primary mental shifts that occur in the lives of all highly successful people. Many make the first, but very few make the second. Both of these shifts require a great deal of mental stretching from conventional and societal ways of thinking.
In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see. Princeton’s Palmer Field, 1951.
I had lived thirty good years before enduring my first food poisoning — odds quite fortunate in the grand scheme of things, but miserably unfortunate in the immediate experience of it.
For a city that has such clearly defined and cherished food forms as hot dogs, pizza, and steak, New York City does not have a single, dominant burger style. While some of the nation's oldest and most storied hamburgers are sold here — such as those at '21' Club, P.J.
Five days ago, Beyoncé stepped outside of the expected pop-idol box and introduced "Formation," a song rooted in her family's mingling of Alabama and Louisiana heritage to create her, a self-described "Texas bama.
Your character is defined by values. And your core values are the result of your behavior. Aristotle said it best: For example, when you always tell the truth, you become an honest person. It’s as simple as that. And yet, we collectively underestimate the importance of values.
Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.
Dealing effectively with emotions is a key leadership skill. And naming our emotions — what psychologists call labeling — is an important first step in dealing with them effectively.
Today, if there's traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there's a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. Fail to do so, and you're committing a crime: jaywalking.
On Friday, November 27, a 57-year-old white man named Robert Louis Dear allegedly injured nine people and killed three in a shooting spree at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Among those shot were four police officers, one of whom died.
Whether presiding over the entire company, a function, a region, or a business unit, the people at the top of an organization have a disproportionate level of influence over those they lead.
Most of us think “perfect” memory means never forgetting, but maybe forgetting actually helps us navigate a world that is random and ever-changing. So say two neuroscientists in a review published today in the journal Neuron.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from reading books, interviewing smart people, and having conversations with my mentors is that questions are more important than answers. But that goes against everything you learn in school where you’re rewarded for the quality of your answers.
It’s easy to lose perspective when we’re facing a thorny dilemma. Blinded by the particulars of the situation, we’ll waffle and agonize, changing our mind from day to day. Perhaps our worst enemy in resolving these conflicts is short-term emotion, which can be an unreliable adviser.
People with a lot of self-control — people who, when they happen upon a delicious food they don’t think they should eat, seemingly grin and bear the temptation until it passes — have it easy. But why? For a long time, the thinking was that these people are good at inhibiting their impulses.
I like to think of myself as a rational person, but I’m not one. The good news is it’s not just me — or you. We are all irrational, and we all make mental errors. For a long time, researchers and economists believed that humans made logical, well-considered decisions.
In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which described his three laws of motion. In the process, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics and redefined the way the world looked at physics and science.
It has happened to all of us. You’re standing in the produce aisle, just trying to buy some zucchini, when you face the inevitable choice: Organic or regular?
Digital transformation, ugh! It hurts just to say it. I’ve just returned from an amazing conference, hosted by Insight Venture Partners, where C-level leaders and board members discussed the opportunities and frustrations of digital transformation.
When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type. It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda’s closest friend, had died.
Taco Bell is the best Mexican food I ever ate. I will say this to your face over a plate of enchiladas suiza. You will shake your head at such transparent provocation. What a shocking thing to say at a restaurant that has the best tacos in New York City! I won't even correct that assertion.
I'm going to cut the preamble here and get straight to the chase: what the hell is going on in this GIF? How did it all happen? Did a troupe of butterflies flap their wings really hard on the other side of the planet, and through the Super Chaos Theory cause this everyman's Cirque du Soleil? I don'
PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading.
I am a robot, programmed to obliterate my to-do list. During the day, I direct a research laboratory, write papers, and teach classes as a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.
Kim Scott had one thing to do that day. She was going to price her product. It was the year 2000, she was the founder and CEO of Juice Software, and she had blocked off her whole morning to make this decision.
The rapid evolution of a wordless tongue. Consider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your computer keyboard.
Why did the busiest person in the world, former president Barack Obama, read an hour a day while in office? Why has the best investor in history, Warren Buffett, invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career?
It's eight in the morning and you can barely keep your eyes open, much less engage in the activities that constitute productive participation in the glorious neoliberal machinery of our economy.
I’ve said before the first 3 hours of your day can dictate how your life turns out. And this often begins with the very first thing that you decide to put in your brain.
How the null hypothesis keeps the hairy hominid alive. I recently got an email from an anthropologist commenting on a new report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
On Wednesday night, it happened again: another mass shooting in America. This time, an armed person killed multiple people at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California.
It had been a good meeting as far as Perry Husband was concerned. The 15 minutes he had been promised to convince the Houston Astros' team brass to fundamentally revamp their organizational approach to pitching had turned into close to an hour.
There were only about three or four ramen shops on Oahu when Hidehito Uki founded Sun Noodle in 1981. Ramen in America was pretty much just a cup of noodles you cooked in the microwave.
I want to discuss a popular TV show my wife and I have been binge-watching on Netflix. It’s the story of a family man, a man of science, a genius who fell in with the wrong crowd. He slowly descends…
Since my tips to improve your writing in two minutes were so popular, I thought I’d share some similar tips to improve your next conversation.
Let me tell you something you already know: Your housekeeper spies on you. We work alone. We get bored. What do you expect?
Although New York City has long had a clearly defined and ubiquitous style of pizza, the city's appetite for the dish knows no bounds. While New Yorkers can certainly be parochial and protective of their home slice, they can also be open and accepting of different pizza points of view.
One of the hardest things in life is to know when to keep going and when to move on. On the one hand, perseverance and grit are key to achieving success in any field. Anyone who masters their craft will face moments of doubt and somehow find the inner resolve to keep going.
From our knees to our eyeballs, our bodies are full of hack solutions. The Greeks were obsessed with the mathematically perfect body. But unfortunately for anyone chasing that ideal, we were designed not by Pygmalion, the mythical sculptor who carved a flawless woman, but by MacGyver.
Great innovators have always known that the key to unlocking a better answer is to ask a better question—one that challenges deeply held assumptions. Yet most people don’t do that, even when brainstorming, because it doesn’t come naturally.
Luck can seem synonymous with randomness. To call someone lucky is usually to deny the relevance of their hard work or talent.
This article is an excerpt from Atomic Habits, my New York Times bestselling book.
Aristotle is credited with saying these 15 famous words. And for most of my life…I didn’t believe him. Know what I discovered?
When I was growing up in New York City, a high point of my calendar was the annual arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — ‘the greatest show on earth’. My parents endured the green-haired clowns, sequinned acrobats and festooned elephants as a kind of garish pageantry.
It’s early and dark. The alarm sounds, and you reach over to switch it off. After a short pause, you sit up. You swing your legs off the bed, touch the floor with your feet, and reach for your phone…
For a long time, Ina Garten was a Hamptons shopkeeper who waited upon the wealthy. She has been, for a shorter time, a celebrity chef of some wealth. "Am I a billionaire? Of course not!" she told me recently over tea on the Upper East Side, and then she laughed.
That was it. We were done. “Co-zee?” she said, sounding out the entirely foreign name, looking more disgruntled with each try. “Col-bee?” “Cot-ee?”
Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.
In Evelyn De Morgan’s numinous painting, Night and Sleep (1878), Nyx, the mighty Greek goddess of night, hovers across a dusky sky with her beloved son Hypnos, the sweet-natured god of sleep.
We talk about metabolism like it's something we can manipulate by gulping a pill, downing some green tea, or running faster. You've seen the articles headlined "Boost your metabolism" or "Try this high-metabolism diet to lose weight."
Warren Buffett, the man commonly referred to as the greatest investor of the 20th century, was standing in front of 165 wide-eyed students from Columbia University. One of the students raised his hand and asked Buffett for his thoughts on the best way to prepare for an investing career.
When pain settled into Blair Golson’s hands, it didn’t let go. What started off as light throbbing in one wrist 10 years ago quickly engulfed the other. The discomfort then spread, producing a pain much “like slapping your hands against a concrete wall,” he says.
If David Tran were a more conventional CEO, he would be a fixture at conferences, a darling of magazine profiles, and a subject of case studies in the Harvard Business Review.
When I got my business degree in 2011, I was ready to start my career. I wanted to start a business, earn money, and also invest. Those were my main priorities for the past seven years.
The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition. I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague.
As the Bible tells it, the first crime committed was a lapse of self-control. Eve was forbidden from tasting the fruit on the tree of knowledge. But the temptation was too much. The fruit was just so “pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,” Genesis reads.
Kim Scott, co-founder of Candor, Inc., has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She first tried it at her own software startup.
Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself. Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way.
Your teenager has a science project due. He hates science. He hates projects (as do you). Do you: If, out of love or a desire to bolster your child’s self-esteem, you picked A or B, teacher and author Jessica Lahey thinks you’re wrong.
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward. My sister Camilla and I stepped off the passenger ferry onto the dock at Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard’s main port, with a group that had already begun their party. They giggled, dragging coolers and beach chairs behind them.
Prioritizing work can be frustrating, especially if you work for a hands-off manager or a company that doesn’t give you clear goals. Most of us face this reality each and every day.
My cat has been dying for the last two years. It is normal to me now — it is simply the state of affairs. There's a rhythm to her medication: prednisone and urosodiol in the morning, urosodiol again in the evening, chemo every other day, a vitamin B shot once a week.
The phrase “shit hits the fan” has uncertain origins. Some claim it’s a descendant of a World War II adage “the garbage hit the fan.” As the Online Etymology Dictionary has it, it derives from an old poop joke.
By 1918, Charles M. Schwab was one of the richest men in the world. Schwab was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the largest shipbuilder and the second-largest steel producer in America at the time.
By then, he said, the thesis had long since vanished. (“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut explained.) But he continued to carry the idea with him for many years after that, and spoke publicly about it more than once.
By now, the idea that gut bacteria affect a person’s health is not revolutionary. Many people know that these microbes influence digestion, allergies, and metabolism.
If you’re not sure what Odd Things in Odd Places is and why I’m in Iraq by myself, here’s why. On the morning of Saturday, August 2nd, I got in a taxi in Erbil, the regional capital of Kurdish Iraq, and asked the driver to take me to the Khazir refugee camp.
On a Saturday night in Modena, a picturesque city in one of the most well-known culinary regions of Italy, a couple and their two young sons dined at the three-Michelin star restaurant Osteria Francescana.
We all know the story. A team creates a groundbreaking new innovation only to see it mired in internal debates. When it is eventually launched in the market, there is an initial flurry of sales to early adopters, but then sales cycles become sluggish.
Twenty years ago, a pair of psychologists hooked up a shoe to a computer. They were trying to teach it to tap in time with a national anthem. However, the job was proving much tougher than anticipated.
The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me.
The XFL jumped off the top turnbuckle in 2001 and landed with a blow equal parts short-lived and long lasting.
I sit down at the table, move my napkin to my lap, and put my phone on the table face-down. I am at a restaurant, I am relaxed, and I am about to start lying to myself. I’m not going to check my phone, I tell myself. (My companion’s phone has appeared face-down on the table, too.
One astronomer has taken to U.S. National Parks to rekindle an old romance. If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for 2 hours.
Bill Rielly had it all: a degree from West Point, an executive position at Microsoft, strong faith, a great family life, and plenty of money.
Last week was not a good week for those hoping to permanently lose weight.
2018 will go down as the year when it became impossible to ignore the increasing advancements of Chinese smartphone hardware, from superlative camera arrays and super-speed charging to in-display fingerprint scanners and creative ways to stretch the display across as much of the front of the phone a
There’s not really any normal way to start a relationship. Some people go on a date, and then another date, and then another, and one day it’s just clear to both of them that they’re in a relationship.
If you give me 4 minutes, I’ll tell you why that’s a bad sign. In the past, I always looked at other people for answers. When you’re little, your school teachers tell you what to do every day. That’s the system at primary school, high school, college, and university.
With well over 50 billion dollars to his name, Warren Buffett is consistently ranked among the wealthiest people in the world. Out of all the investors in the 20th century, Buffett was the most successful.
Ketamine’s remarkable effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness. One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry. At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine.
Imagine for a second that I’m your father. I know that may bring up all sorts of awkward and unpleasant connotations, but stay with me here — and until we’re done, just call me “Dad.”
My bodega is only a little bigger than my studio apartment, and sells no fewer than 10 kinds of Muscle Milk.
Exactly today (Dec. 26th 2016) I haven’t had a single drop of alcohol or coffee in 27 months. If you're reading this later, you can do the math yourself. A couple of my friends on Facebook & Twitter asked me to write about my experience, so here it is, in a nutshell.
Just as fish presumably don’t know they’re wet, many English speakers don’t know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out. It’s easy to think that what one’s native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality.
This week, the Cut brings you True Romance: five days of stories about love as it’s actually lived. I’m an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can “keep the romance alive” in their marriages.
There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength. When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak.
About four years ago I started working for myself. I wanted the freedom and flexibility to own my schedule and the space to bring my ideas to life.
Human behaviors are often tied to one another. For example, consider the case of a woman named Jennifer Dukes Lee.
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche.
“If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve,” Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: “Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love.
A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what's driving Donald Trump's ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016.
“Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs,” says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language.
The sheer stress of an environment contributes to obesity and diabetes. It was the most ambitious social experiment ever conducted by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. And one of the most surprising.
To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged. Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the nation-state of their birth. But why? The argument for open borders is both economic and moral.
Before the smartphone backlash, before apps were likened to cigarettes for kids or Facebook co-founder Sean Parker mused that “God knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” or Tim Cook revealed he doesn’t let his nephew touch social media, and before the demands for studies and regul
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes. I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked.
One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did.
This summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense.
When it went public in 2011, over a decade after the company’s founding, Pandora employed fewer than 40 engineers.
The most dramatic transformations that he’s observed have been in disabled military veterans on 16-day kayaking trips organised by a group called Team River Runner.