David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: [Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.
Databases of this type are interrogated in a language called SQL. You send them commands like the one shown here to interact with their stored information. Understanding how to manipulate these databa...
Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four disciplines (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully...
Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away...
Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, oh, that’s well written code. It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.
Bad courses, with incompatible professors and unreasonable requirements, are the key to developing an ulcer.
As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employe...
Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-m...
An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.
Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: Thoughts? These e-mails take the sender only...
All the people I ever admired and respected led balanced lives—studying hard, partying hard, as well as being involved in activities and getting a decent amount of sleep each night. I really think thi...
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Blaise Pascal
A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of you...
A Brief Mission Intermission Let’s take a moment to pull together what we’ve learned so far about mission. In the last chapter, I used Pardis Sabeti’s story to emphasize that you need career capital b...
A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a...
Without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.
When you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It’s at this point that you’re most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually b...
The technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.