Principles for the 21st Century Human

Bad news doesn’t get better with time, and good news shared late feels less good. Tell people what’s happening when it’s happening, especially when it’s not what they want to hear.

Most people let proximity decide who they become. But one question turns chance into intention.

No one is ever more perfect than when writing their resume. More than once in my professional life I found myself involved in hiring someone who seemed like the Platonic Ideal of a candidate for the role. The right jobs at the right companies and a clean run of gigs with plausible explanations for each…

I spent a long time thinking confidence was the goal. Study something, get good at it, develop strong opinions, and voilà! Expertise! Spend time with someone who knows a lot about a given topic. A scientist, historian, surgeon, master musician. They hedge far more than an amateur does. “I’m not sure” comes up constantly. They…

The things that resist counting are often the ones that count the most. A few years ago, I was unhappy in my job. My solution was to push for a higher salary and a bigger mandate. Within six months of successfully getting what I wanted, I was miserable in ways I had not anticipated and…

I’ve become allergic to the word ‘should’. When someone uses it on me, I recoil. The certainty behind it reveals something: the speaker has confused their opinion with my reality. Everyone has thoughts about your life choices. Your family thinks you should call home more often. Your co-worker has strong opinions on how you should…

Miracle-dependent planning feels good in the moment. It’s optimistic. It makes us feel capable and confident. We tell ourselves we’re being ambitious, not unrealistic. But we are confusing hope with strategy. Good plans account for normal human limitations. Bad plans assume everything will go perfectly. Build in extra time, because things take longer than expected….

I believe love is just chemistry and evolutionary programming and I believe it’s the most real thing we experience. I believe the universe is meaningless matter following physical laws and I believe my choices matter profoundly. In a recent podcast interview with my longtime friend and colleague Jeremy Sirota I told him, “I like to…

I did not coin this phrase, but I love it as a way to counter self-pity. It’s easy to feel like things happen to you rather than with you. The party was boring, but you didn’t really try to make it better. The relationship ended badly, but you mostly avoided the difficult conversations that might…