Letters Remain

Tag: personal-development

  • Testing Rationality and Bias

    How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like?  Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such…

  • Procrastination as Newton’s First Law

    There’s a lot I identify with in this article of Joel Spolsky’s where he talks of using the Fire and Motion strategy to cope with workplace procrastination. There have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m…

  • Setting Goals: A Good Idea?

    Could setting goals be detrimental to achieving our targets? Yes, say a number of “management scholars” researching the issue, but only because they may lead to “bursts of intense effort in the short term” or be too narrow and poorly defined. The comprehensive article looking at their work has some interesting anecdotes and some good…

  • What Should Any Educated Person Know?

    Tucker Max creates a list of what he believes is the information any educated person should know. By no means a definitive list (far from it), but some good information regardless. English lit: Read lots of novels, especially the classics. There are hundreds of sites out there that purport to list the Western Canon, browse a…

  • Your Personal Love–Growth–Cash Triangles

    Personal love–growth–cash triangles: a visual method for evaluating your life, your career, and everything in between. “If you have a shit job, come up with new ways to learn something out of it. If you have a hobby you’re super-excited about, try to turn it into a business. If you’re just starting a new gig,…

  • 10 Tips for Achieving Intense Productivity

    RSD’s Tyler gives us some tips for achieving periods of intense productivity by avoiding the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ problem (plus some comments): Remove the Internet from your house A bit extreme for me, but limiting its use is undoubtedly a good idea. Remove television from your house I don’t watch ‘broadcast’ TV anyway: it’s…

  • 20 Things Everyone Needs to Know

    I’m usually quite sceptical about similar lists, but The Independent‘s 20 Things Everyone Needs to Know struck me as actually useful as each list item is authored by a professional who works in that field. And when you’ve got an article co-authored by the likes of Donald Trump, Jennifer Capriati and Larry King, how can…

  • Letting Go of Love

    Worldly advice from Ask MetaFilter. How do you let go of love? […] For an added level of difficulty, this is a relationship that you don’t really have any bad memories of, so you can’t use those to change the direction of your thoughts. One piece of advice from me? Originally written as advice on…