I was talking on the phone with my parent earlier today about some challenges I’m experiencing. They responded: “Of course it’s tough!” For whatever reason, the comment gave me pause. It prompted me to ask myself: “On what grounds was I expecting things to be easy?” I didn’t have a…

Learning to take increasingly challenging situations in stride is an invaluable skill. I thought I’d shake things up today and ask a large language model (LLM) to define what it even means to take something “in stride” — here is a response from Anthropic’s LLM, Claude: “To take something in…

There are several incentives that motivate us to work on a problem: we want to improve our lives, we want to make a living, we want to improve other people’s lives, etc. In general, I think the most satisfying incentive with the most driving force is the desire to improve other people’s lives. There’s just something distinctly rewarding about contributing to something that lifts other people up, or in some cases protects them, in meaningful ways.

Whenever I share a new artificial intelligence tool with my peers, I urge them to distinguish between the technology’s current performance and its potential. It’s easy to hold a magnifying glass up to an odd response from a large language model or goofy-looking image from a text-to-image model and prematurely…

It’s always amusing to eat spicy food with friends and observe our wide range of reactions: For some, it’s not spicy at all. For others, there’s just a little kick. And for the rest, the spiciness is a total shock to the body. Everyone’s eating the same food. It’s just…

It’s possible to be invested in so many different legitimately useful ideas & projects that you are unable to pursue any of them to completion. I suspect that the reason why some people are better at getting important work done isn’t that they have fewer things to do, but more due to the fact that they‘ve made a firm habit out of only ever focusing on a few things and not moving on to something else until they are complete.

Thinking or lamenting about the last thing that occurred is a quick way to halve your output. If all a golf player can think about is how off their last swing felt, that’s less focus and attention they can invest in the swing they’re about to take. If all a…

In a discussion about when it makes sense to adopt new metrics, an advisor told me: “Only add them when you have conviction in it.” Conviction. The word really stuck with me. Metrics aside, I think we’d all be genuinely more satisfied with where we invest our time and energy if conviction was the gatekeeper. What if we only committed to things that we had the conviction to spend the next ten years of our lives on?

Most problems have a shorter half-life than we think. In many cases, what feels like a big deal at home or at work today probably won’t seem as significant a week or month from now. It’s not time itself that shrinks these problems, but what we do with the time: Our mind uses the time to process, rationalize, and clarify. We use it to develop and implement solutions. And the sleep we get during that time certainly helps too.