Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Personal Finance

Personal Finance for Executives: Why High Earners Stay Broke

A client of mine — Chief Product Officer at a mid-sized SaaS company, 44 years old, $420,000 in total compensation — sat down with me last March to look at his personal balance sheet. Two kids in private school. Mortgage on a four-bedroom in Zone 3 London. Leased car. Regular flights

Burnout

Burnout Isn't a Rest Problem — It's an Autonomy Problem

The standard narrative of burnout has three acts. Protagonist works too hard. Protagonist ignores warning signs. Protagonist collapses and takes six months to recover, emerging with a newfound appreciation for boundaries and yoga. The cultural version of this story frames burnout as a rest problem — too much work, insufficient recovery,

Networking

How to Network When You Hate Networking

If you're reading this, there's maybe a 60% chance you've never been to a formal networking event that produced a relationship that actually mattered to your career. The standard format — nametag, plastic cup, 20 people standing around a function room hoping someone interesting will

mentorship

Mentorship the Old-Fashioned Way: Why Coffee Chats Don't Work and What Does

The modern version of mentorship has decayed into a specific ritual: a 30-minute coffee chat, maybe quarterly, in which a senior person dispenses advice while a junior person takes notes. Both sides feel they've done the thing. The junior person gets to tell their boss they have a

Strategy

The Two-Hour Strategy Meeting: Why Most Companies Waste the Most Important Session of the Year

Most companies have a strategy offsite. They happen once or twice a year, they last two to three days, they're held in conference centres or rented houses, and they produce slide decks that almost nobody refers to three weeks later. The offsite industry is worth hundreds of millions

Habits

How to Build a Morning Routine That Isn't 5 AM Theatre

The most viewed video on YouTube with the title "5 AM Morning Routine" has about 18 million views. The presenter wakes at 04:50, meditates for 20 minutes, journals for 15, does a workout for 45, eats a specific protein breakfast, takes five supplements, reads for 30 minutes,

Performance

Focus Under Stress: What Special Forces Selection Teaches About Performance Breakdowns

The UK Special Air Service selection course is one of the most punishing military selection processes in the world. Over roughly six months, candidates are subjected to sustained physical exertion, sleep deprivation, cold, hunger, and — most importantly — continuous cognitive demand under stress. The part that surprises observers: the failure rate

Decision Making

How to Think in Bets: The Annie Duke Framework That Beats Most MBA Strategy Classes

Annie Duke played professional poker for 18 years, winning more than $4 million in tournament earnings, before retiring to write and consult. Her book Thinking in Bets (2018) condenses what she learned about decision-making under uncertainty in a domain where you're forced, every hand, to distinguish between the

Decision Making

Decision Journals: The Boring Habit That Makes Smart People Measurably Better

Michael Mauboussin, the strategist now at Morgan Stanley, has written about decision journals in multiple papers and talks over the last fifteen years. The research he cites, mostly from Philip Tetlock's work on forecasting and from studies of expert judgment, converges on a pattern that almost nobody in

Strategy

Pareto in Practice: Finding Your Actual 80/20 Without Fooling Yourself

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed in 1896 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He extended the observation to wealth distribution and then to peas in his garden (20% of the pods produced 80% of the peas). Over the century that followed,

Prioritisation

The Eisenhower Matrix Is Too Simple — How to Build a Real Prioritisation System

Dwight Eisenhower never drew the matrix that now bears his name. In a 1954 speech, he quoted an unnamed university president who distinguished between urgent and important problems, noting that "the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of

Mental Models

Mental Models from Charlie Munger That Changed How I Run a Business

Charlie Munger, who died in November 2023 at 99, spent sixty years as Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway. His annual speeches at the Daily Journal meetings and at Berkshire produced a distinct body of work on what he called "mental models" — the cross-disciplinary thinking tools

PKM

How to Build a Second Brain — and Why Most Attempts Fail

Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain (2022) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned a cottage industry of courses, templates, and YouTube walkthroughs. The promise was appealing: your life contains too much information for one biological brain to retain, but a structured digital system — a "second

Learning

Learning Velocity: Why Some People Double Their Skills Every Two Years

Between 2018 and 2023 I watched two colleagues — similar age, similar starting point, both analysts at the same consulting firm — take measurably different career trajectories. One is now a director at a top-tier fund, running a portfolio worth nine figures. The other is still an analyst, at a different but

Learning

The Feynman Technique: How to Know If You Actually Understand Something

Richard Feynman had a specific test for whether he actually understood something. He would pick a technical concept — a mathematical proof, a physical mechanism, a derivation — and try to explain it to a class of freshmen, or sometimes to himself out loud as if to a freshman. If he got

reading

Speed Reading Is Mostly Nonsense — Here's What the Evidence Actually Shows

The speed reading industry is worth roughly $200 million a year globally, built on courses, apps, and books promising to triple or quadruple your reading speed while maintaining comprehension. Evelyn Wood, who founded Reading Dynamics in 1959, claimed to teach students to read 1,500 to 6,000 words per

PKM

Obsidian vs Notion vs Roam: Which Personal Knowledge Tool Is Worth the Switch

I have used Notion since 2019, Roam Research from 2020 to 2023, and Obsidian from 2022 through today. At one point, for about eight months, I was paying for all three and actively using all three. This was, with hindsight, a mistake. Each of these tools is genuinely good. None

Note Taking

The Zettelkasten Method: How a German Sociologist Wrote 70 Books Using Index Cards

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist who between 1951 and his death in 1998 published 70 books and around 400 academic papers. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most prolific social theorists of the twentieth century. When asked how he did it, he never attributed the output

goal setting

Why SMART Goals Are a Trap for Ambitious People

George Doran coined SMART goals in a 1981 management-review article. The idea, reasonable at the time, was that vague managerial objectives produced vague outcomes, and that forcing people to write goals that were Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound would pull performance upward. For ordinary corporate work — hitting a quarterly

goal setting

OKRs for One: How to Apply the Google Goal System to Your Personal Career

John Doerr introduced OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — to Google in 1999. He'd learned them at Intel under Andy Grove, who had adapted them from Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives from the 1950s. The format became internal company currency at Google, and from there spread to

Habits

Habit Design: Why New Year's Resolutions Die by February and What Actually Replaces Them

The business of New Year's resolutions is worth somewhere between $30 and $60 billion globally — gym memberships, nutrition apps, productivity tools, self-help books, language-learning subscriptions. Most of the economic value is generated in January and is gone by mid-February, because 92% of new resolutions, according to University of

Communication

Slack Is Quietly Killing Your Focus — the Settings That Reclaim Your Day

Slack, like Facebook and TikTok and every other growth-stage consumer or prosumer tool, is built on engagement metrics. The product team at Slack is measured — explicitly — on Daily Active Users, messages per user per day, and session length. This is not evil, but it is a conflict of interest you

productivity

Inbox Zero Is a Lie — Here's the Email System That Scales Past 300 a Day

Inbox Zero, as a concept, was invented by Merlin Mann in 2006. By 2009, Merlin Mann was publicly arguing that Inbox Zero was a lie — or, more precisely, that the cultural version of Inbox Zero had become the exact opposite of what he'd intended. The original idea was

Meetings

How to Run a Meeting That People Actually Want to Attend

The most productive meeting I have ever been in lasted seven minutes. It was a Tuesday morning at a mid-sized logistics company in Rotterdam, the weekly operations review for the Benelux region. Seven people. One agenda item at a time. Each person had exactly 45 seconds to flag a specific

leadership

The Delegation Ladder: A 5-Level System to Stop Being the Bottleneck

A COO I coached in Hamburg last year had 17 direct reports and was working 75 hours a week. He was convinced that the problem was his team — they weren't as senior as they needed to be, they couldn't be trusted with the harder decisions, and