If you coach poorly, people have an almost allergic reaction to it. It probably feels like suddenly being with a life-coach/shrink without having signed up for it. If you do it well though, it doesn’t look like “coaching”, and you just make change happen. So how do you think carefully about delivering a message that makes change, without seeming like you’re totally off your rocker for trying to play games with someone?...
This is a short riff on spotting potential. Sometimes you need someone with epic skills ready to plug in, but that’s not what this is about. This is about what potential looks like. When someone took the time to prepare for their interview, that might be potential. When someone has a beautiful CV that’s not a stock template, smells like potential. When someone presents a portfolio of things they’ve made, the potentiometer starts jittering....
An epic 3-year project from Malcolm Gladwell about how bad we are at knowing other humans. The key takeaway for me was that it’s hubris to assume that one can know another person. Spies, CIA interrogators, judges, police – none of them can tell when someone is lying, none of them can predict with any decent hit rate a future choice someone will make. We assume the best in other people, until the opposing evidence becomes impossible to ignore (an extremely high threshold for most)....
Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world, and why things are better than you think. The crowning jewel of one man’s life work. One of the most important books Bill Gates has ever read. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is a bit of a masterpiece. The team behind Factfulness is the same team that’s developed https://www.gapminder.org/ There are ten instincts that guide us astray when it comes to interpreting how the world is really developing....
Symposium is an ancient classic, it’s super short, and reading it in 2020 sets off a total clusterfuck of associative thoughts that I felt an extreme need to try to organise and reflect on. So here goes. What it is: Symposium is a story from The Dialogues of Plato, which essentially means it’s something Plato once heard someone say that they heard someone else say. It’s still an epic reflection of life in Greece 400 years BC....