On Setting The Mood

Seth Godin asks a thought provoking question: If it takes one phone call from a close friend and a random act of kindness from a stranger to make your day go from a bad one to a good one, why would you ever choose to have a lousy day? Even better, why would you let…

Reflections On Skills I Want Before My First Company

3 months ago I documented the skills I would like to develop before starting my first company. I didn’t expect 3 months to go by so quickly. But then, who does? Today I reflected on the skills I wrote down and how I feel I’ve progressed. Hard Skills Finance 45/100Finished “An Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham, but wouldn’t…

The Relationship Between Pain And Impactful Work

Your resume is a story of the pain you’ve been through. It proclaims the hard things you’ve done. Like managing a team or founding a company. Like preserving when the odds seemed slim and there was a plethora of doubt. You’re trying something hard, you’re doing something mildly uncomfortable. And hard things are often (not…

A New Perspective On Eliminating Poverty

Before I die, I would like to give away over half of my wealth. With that goal in mind I’ve been thinking of ways to give away my wealth effectively. Especially when I hear news similar to what one research institution in Bangladesh found of the more than 30 billion in foreign donor assistance received…

Iterating Isn’t Just For Businesses

It’s also for yourself. To understand how iteration applies to your personal life let’s first understand how it applies to the business world. If you’re running a marketing campaign, iterating just once or twice a year, slowly responding to feedback from the marketplace, the campaign is going to take a long time to get right….