He fumbled with the soft flesh and skin, searching for a good grip. He found it. Slowly he raised it to his mouth, biting down into it, squishing the cinnamon-coated flesh between his gums and pulling it off the floppy skin. He grinned. We had a breakthrough. He loves cinnamon-baked apples. Teaching our son to …
“And then you start thinking like an octopus.” There is a moment in the captivating Netflix documentary, in between laughing and crying, that I had an epiphany. It was when filmmaker Craig Foster said, “I needed to learn everything.“ I make a living helping people create training courses, and as I watched the film, I …
Lessons from Jefferson, Kant, and the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. “I have an aunt in Hamburg, but she is dead,” said Count Sagramoso in broken German. “Why didn’t you have her skinned and stuffed?” replied the schoolmaster. Wait, what? In our age of social media and soundbites, it’s not too hard to imagine this triggering …
There’s this concept in the movie Inception, that you never quite know how a dream started. You always just find yourself in the middle of it. It feels incredibly real, and you’re completely focused on what happens next. This makes me think about the decisions I’ve made in my life that have led me to …
Writing is the iterative process, optimized by involving others, of adding detail to the pillars of a single idea. Romantic visions of writers depict them holed up in a cabin in the woods or sitting at a sun-soaked window in the top room of an old hotel where they seem to be the only guest. …
As a team, we read and write a lot of scripts for training videos. If there is one thing I’ve learned it is that there is no perfect script (or essay or blog post or email). But there is a process for writing that you can use to approach perfection. Before that even, you need …
The future is online. In 20 years, I believe the key to a successful career will be the ability to build an audience. The audience can be built through writing, photography, music… anything you can create really. The future is online, and it’s for makers. Makers who can convince enough people to pay them for …
What gets you up in the morning? Recently I wrote to email subscribers with a story about discovering my number one personal value thanks to a probing question from a friend and a sharp retort of realism from my wife. I got a lot of responses and feedback. Everyone asks themselves this same question. The …
Every year I save dozens of articles for offline reading in Instapaper. This year I did a review of them for the first time. The best ones are timeless essays from independent online writers that helped me improve my thinking. Here are my top seven to help you decide what to read in 2020 to …
Have you ever wanted to know who your parents really were growing up? What stories do they have? What experiences did they enjoy? What memories stuck with them? I set out to do just this. Earlier this year I saw this tweet from Paul Graham: Something I wish I’d done while my mother was still …