Hey folks, Your nuggets for the week: Motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose People aren’t that logical Pick your ideas apart #1 Motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery, and...
Hey folks, Today’s nuggets: Complement your manager’s skillset Ask for what you want Prove your work is important Get others to prove your case #1 Complement your manager’s skills...
There goes 2020. This was the year I started writing seriously. It started off as a way to remember what I read, with this newsletter being an effective forcing function. So how did the year go? 17...
In economics class they told us people work harder as they paid more. That greed was a virtue. It sounded iffy. You may have noticed the opposite yourself: How did you feel the last time you worked on...
It felt wrong. I was one year into working at Google, one of the best companies in the world. People die to get a job here. But…something was off. I was bored. Yes, the amenities were great....
Ever study something, but when you try to explain it realize that you’d understood nothing? A few sips from the pool of knowledge and we think we know it all! I find it helpful to combat this...
On my last project, I kept run into problem after problem. It felt like fighting a hydra, I’d chop off one head and two others would appear. I was building a time zone converter app, or trying...
Ever find yourself reading insightful advice, but forgetting all about it when it was time to put it to action? It would happen to me all the time (heck, still does). I desperately wanted to get...
When was the last time you changed your mind about something big? For me, it happens about every three years. The most recent one happened last January, when Naseem Taleb’s book Antifragile...
Psychological safety at the workplace comes with tradeoffs. Where should you draw the line between making it safe about their performance, while still requiring people to meet expectations? Slava and...
My aunt has a problem: she wants to join Zoom meetings, but they’re all hosted in different time zones. And she can’t convert them to her local time. She has to ask for help every time....
In school, did you hesitate to ask questions? I certainly did. It was peer pressure, raising my hand was a big no-no. I didn’t want to be that kid. So I suppressed the instinct to ask. And those...
Hi friends, My sister just wanted to earn some money before returning to college. She found a job posting on craigslist, which she learned too late had been carefully written by scammers. Those people...
At work, cutting scope is a way to potentially save weeks of effort. But where does cutting scope cross the line into cutting corners? Slava and I try to find that line in: The Nonintuitive Bits...
Today I’m sharing a hard truth about our industry. I wanted to reject this for the longest time. But I finally had to change my mind. Companies don’t actually focus on their users. They...
A couple weeks ago I suggested repeating your message twenty one times for it to sink in. That might seem excessive, but my old manager Viacheslav Kovalevskyi has used this tactic to get senior...
Do you have people who disagree with you? My old coworkers from Google are happy to do it. They’re great to bounce ideas off of, and last October we started a podcast where we’d discuss...
In the past few days, some of my articles have really hit a chord on reddit and hacker news. I’m stoked to see them helping people. And they’ve led to a lot of new faces on the newsletter...
Two years into my first job at Microsoft, I was expecting to be fired. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, like I was only pretending to be smart. I spent years desperately trying to hide my...
Ever notice that itās much easier to give advice to others than to give advice to yourself? I have a group of friends from my writing class, and every week we offer each other feedback on our essays....
Last weekend I had a huge zoom call with my extended family. Parents with nine siblings each equals many, many cousins. I met cousins who I hadn’t talked to in years, saw nephews and nieces...
It’s amazing how much the simple act of writing down your ideas helps you think š¤Æ That happened to me this week. I’m writing an article about altruism (you’ll see it next week), and...
Last week I said that I’m taking an online writing class called Write of Passage. What made me sign up for it? Well, I read a lot. I mean a LOT. Like, the-librarian-knows-me-by-name a lot. But...
I recently started David Perellās course āWrite of Passageā Itās an intensive 5 week class teaching how to extract all those thoughts in your head and put them down on paper. Itās a grueling pace,...