Getting Good at What You’re Bad At

What are you “bad” at? Is it math, public speaking, writing? While it’s true that we’ve each got strengths and weaknesses, we can come to see our weak areas as intellectual dead zones where growth is impossible. I’m prone to this belief myself, to be honest. I need periodic reality checks. In a blog post chock full of useful productivity advice, tech entrepreneur Sam Altman reminds us of something we knew as kids:

Life is a Steak: a Metaphor for Understanding Work

Your time on this earth is a juicy t-bone steak. The person eating that steak is your job. Our jobs are ravenous: they devour the best hours of the day during the best days of the week during the best weeks of the year during the best years of our lives. If our life is a fine steak, they consume everything but the meat on the bone. To extend the metaphor: it’s true that some of the most tender meat on a t-bone is on the bone, and we can do incredible things with our evenings, weekends, and golden years.

Haggling? Ackerman Bargaining Is the Formula You’ve Been Looking For

I’ve got a quick, super useful tip for you today: Ackerman bargaining. It’s a rule of thumb that could save you quite a bit of money over your lifetime, and all you have to remember is three two-digit numbers. Whether you love to haggle or can’t stand it, chances are you have to negotiate a price from time to time. Perhaps you’re in the market for a used car, or maybe (like me) you do a lot of your shopping on eBay using the “Make Offer” function.

Costly Signals: How We Prove We Mean Business

As a college senior, I took an introductory philosophy course. It was a big class—around 50 students. On the first day of class, my fellow students and I filed into the classroom to meet our professor. The professor began by welcoming each of us to class. Individually. By name. Row by row, he looked each student in the eye and greeted everyone by name. This got our attention. It turned out he’d used a little-known feature in the school’s computer system to access the class roster along with each student’s ID photo.

How to Read . . . Less? When to Put a Book Down

You’re deep in a nonfiction book when one of these realizations strikes you. “This book isn’t very good.” “This book may be good, but I am not enjoying it.” “The author’s point has been fully made, but there’s a lot of book left.” Do you finish the book? I recently read about a third of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. The author is a public intellectual and a skilled writer, but I misunderstood the book’s aim and wasn’t deriving value from it.