Category: Uncategorized

Recently I heard that Valve, a highly successful video game company, has four hundred employees and no management structure. According to all reports, they make that model work. I spent a lot of time trying to imagine working for a company with no management. How do they resolve conflicts, set priorities,…

You often hear advice from successful people that you should “Follow your passion.”  That sounds about right. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right? Here’s the counterargument:  When I was a…

My city recently passed a law making it illegal for stores to provide plastic bags for free at the checkout stand. Now we have the option of paying ten cents for a paper bag or bringing our own. If one looks at this new law in isolation, it seems reasonable…

I have an astonishingly bad memory. On the plus side, I’m more creative than most civilians. I think the two are connected. That’s my hypothesis for today. I’m good at remembering concepts, systems, ideas, and generally how things flow and fit together. But I don’t have a trace of photographic…

This weekend my wife and I went shopping to replace our beloved minivan. Negotiating car prices is a fascinating experience. I’m not good at negotiating because I’ve never taken acting classes. I find it hard to get into character. When the salesman asked me how much I wanted to spend…

I’m finally getting around to reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. I’m fascinated by the discussion of how Jobs developed what became known as the Reality Distortion Field. Apparently Jobs had a lifelong battle with reality and won. One way to look at Jobs’ life is that he…

I once worked with a woman who had a degree in economics. Her boyfriend drove her crazy by arguing that the entire field of economics could be boiled down to the notion of supply and demand. Everything else, he asserted, was an unnecessary complication of the obvious. It’s funny, but…

If you had to pick one priority in your life, could you do it? That’s an important question because focusing on the wrong priority would get you a bad result, and having multiple priorities isn’t practical. For example, if health is your top priority, you might make choices that are…

Do the rich get more benefits from the government in return for their tax dollars? In a recent post, I casually mentioned that all citizens get roughly the same benefit from the government. Several readers objected. Let’s throw some more gasoline on that campfire. This question matters because if the…

Today I will make my best case for why you should vote for me for President of the United States. I’ll be using some powerful tricks of persuasion, so don’t read further if that sort of thing would bother you. By the way, the first paragraph was a trick of…

Yesterday was a fascinating day for me. I wrote a little blog post earlier in the week in which I said President Obama should be fired for putting resources behind medical marijuana prosecutions in California. And then the Internet puked on my shoes. (See my post below for all of…

With Congress’ approval rating at 12%, there’s no longer any argument that the U.S. government is broken. Lefties and Tea Partiers alike are starting to support the idea of calling a Constitutional Convention. This will be a good test of the Founding Fathers’ ultimate emergency safeguard. Voters understand that elections…

The other day I put on my workout clothes and drove to the gym. But when I arrived I didn’t feel like working out. This was not a huge surprise, since I didn’t feel peppy before I even laced up my running shoes. Perhaps I hadn’t gotten enough sleep that…

Update at bottom. I’m trying to contact my 84-year old Dad who lives in Windham NY, the town apparently hit hardest by Irene’s flooding. The Main Street is described as “wiped out.” This is the town in which I grew up. My father lives alone on a hill above where the…