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By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs The history of employment can be summarized as “companies vs. employees.” The history of employment This tug-of-war was always viewed as zero sum: any gain by labor was, by definition, a loss for management and shareholders, and vice versa. This mentality is captured in…
This post is a transposition of my Fluent talk Becoming a team lead: a survival guide . It’s been edited to better fit a blog post format. If you prefer to see the original format, you can view the slides with speaker notes instead. A video of the talk will be up some time in July 2018. A survival…
I often talk to founders who believe they’ve found product/market fit when they haven’t. This is a huge problem because they start hiring people, increasing burn, and optimizing their product before they’ve actually discovered what needs to be built. I’m writing this post to help you understand when…
The makers of the documentary “The King” turn to Elvis Presley with hopes of understanding something about the state of the country: what it’s been through, where it’s going. Photograph by CBS Photo Archive / Getty “The King” is a stirring new documentary that addresses Elvis Presley’s complex…
Photo by Layla Burford. Whether you’re learning to meditate or ride a bike, says Ajahn Jayasaro, it’s not about how good you are or how far you get. The point is simply to practice with a sincere and consistent effort. As I remember, the majority of the teachings that Ajahn Chah gave were not…
This is a deeply disturbing time in American history. The basic rights and protections of the country’s most vulnerable are under attack, distrust in every institution — education, science, journalism, and of course, government — is at an all-time high, and every day’s headlines brings new horrors.…
I hate to break it to you, but to make it in the UX profession, you have to network . I’ll be the first to admit that I hate large networking events. I’m deathly afraid of rejection, and even think the term “networking” feels slimy. All of that is still true except for one thing: how I feel about…
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. If we hear the metaphor “life is a joke,” our usual inference is a negative one: that a joke is a pitiful and sad thing for life to be, that life should be more than a “mere” joke. It seems to be a negative judgment of both life and humor. Here I…
George Plimpton and Donald Hall. Donald Hall served as The Paris Review ’s first poetry editor from 1953 to 1961. His vast knowledge of contemporary poetry and demand for excellence helped set the Review ’s poetry standards high from the beginning . In this undated letter, which is an ars poetica of…
Artists and scientists throughout history have remarked on the bliss that accompanies a sudden creative insight. Einstein described his realization of the general theory of relativity as the happiest moment of his life. More poetically, Virginia Woolf once observed, “Odd how the creative power…
image via Alexey Kljatov By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of…
Monday’s fish has been around since Friday, under God knows what conditions. Illustration by Adrian Gill Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young…
There are many practices that have emerged in recent years to accelerate progress at work: daily stand-ups, weekly review meetings, and my favorite – sprints . In this context, a sprint is a set period of time that is dedicated to achieving a goal. Many tech companies have adopted this method in…
In 2006, inventor Ray Kurzweil released the book The Singularity Is Near , with a bold prediction that by the year 2049 we’d enter a “technological singularity.” Around that time, he argued, the pace of improvement in technology would become a runaway phenomenon that would transform all aspects of…
Due out Fall 2018 It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work By Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson Preorder the book from Barnes & Noble “It’s crazy at work.” How often have you heard that? Or said it yourself? Probably too often. For many, “it’s crazy at work” has become their normal. But why's…
In the Meditating on Psychedelics podcast series my intention is to gain a deeper understanding of the relative merits and dangers of the mixing Buddhist contemplative practice and ritualized psychedelic use. In order to do this, I’ve found it necessary to first get clear on the scope of this…
May 17, 2018 | In Magazine | By “Meditators are psychonauts,” says Vincent Horn, a Buddhist teacher and podcaster who has lately explored the common threads in Buddhist and psychedelic communities and practices. “There is that general interest in exploring further reaches of one’s consciousness that…
I’ve written about René Girard’s ideas once before , to try my hand at identifying mimetic crises in the world of George R. R. Martin. Today I’d like to apply Girard’s ideas to another world in which people are driven to conflict over small differences and personal slights. (Rather than attempting…
Bret Victor / July 3, 2013 Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain. Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem,…
I want to tell you a story today. A sprawling epic mess of a story which began with two histories intersecting awkwardly just over a hundred years ago in a small tribal village nestled in the dense forests of one of the richest mining regions of the world. It is the kind of story that has multiple…
[Note: I have a nagging feeling I’ve spent a few thousand words spelling out something completely obvious. Still, I hope there’s value in actually spelling it out.] It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. —William Jefferson Clinton He was right, you know. A few months ago I argued in The…
It will soon be three months since the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituted its new admissions policy: pay what you wish for New Yorkers and tristate students, a discount for the elderly and groups, and twenty-five dollars for everybody else. From 1970 to 2018, the Met’s policy had been a more…
A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it. We already had the coup. It happened on…
The sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard are still inside my head. — Richard Rodgers We discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held – traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords – single, timeless events apprehended all at once…
Today, the design consultancy Ideo announced that it has acquired Datascope , a Chicago-based data science company. The acquisition is meant to help Ideo, one of the country’s most prominent firms, respond to demand from AI-powered clients and can be read as a harbinger of where the design industry…
Glenn Harvey I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes/Thomson Reuters Foundation Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, part of greater Mexico City, 2016 Geoffrey West spent most of his life as a research scientist and administrator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, running programs concerned not with nuclear weapons but with peaceful…
The title is misleading. Kramer and Alstad started writing a book about problems in guru-disciple relationships. However, they realized two things: such problems are partly due to common “spiritual” misunderstandings of ; and guru-disciple power dynamics are similar to other relationships of…
Self-confidence is not a feeling of superiority, but ofindependence. —Lama Yeshe Because there is no cosmic plan,questions of ultimate value are meaningless. Because there is nocosmic plan, our futures are nevercertain. This opens the possibility of freedom. Our destiny is alwaysambiguous. Of…
Image courtesy graysnork We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. This is the last essay in a series on “ how to be a…
Image courtesy Inextremiss We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In “Eating the shadow,” I suggested five phases:…
Image courtesy TeaBeforeWar We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In “Eating the shadow,” I suggested five…
Image courtesy Inextremiss We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In 2010, I wrote a series of essays that tried…
“ ‘One day when they were of age, the two remaining brothersdetermined to set out on a Quest, to seek their fortune in the wideworld. For they were brave and handsome and clever—or at leastthe older brother was—and their village seemed too small forthem. Their father pleaded with them not to go, for…
Dakinis were fearsome witches who ate human flesh. They were also the enlightened goddesses who made tantric Buddhism available to humankind. “Where did Buddhist Tantra come from?” is a question that fascinates me. Understanding the origins of a cultural system often helps make sense what it has…
Intuition and logic; chaos and pattern – how do these words relate to romance? What significance do they have to ‘falling in love’? How do these word-pairs reflect the dance of relationship between men and women? The energy of these word pairs permeates every aspect of our lives: randomness and…
The method of intensification Nigel Tufnel, guitarist in the decreasingly-fictional heavy metal band Spinal Tap , explained that they could play louder than anyone else because their amplifiers went to eleven . Tantra has a similar approach. It is not the polite Middle Way between extremes. It is…
Almost every culture, religion, ideology, or world-view holdssome things as sacred, pure, holy, or unquestionably true—and others asprofane, unclean, or taboo. Among the few exceptions are Zen and Dzogchen. They holdthat there is nothing that is inherently sacred. (This ought to be an…
I mean “energy” in an everyday, non-spiritual sense. I mean “energy” in the way you speak of: Having a low-energy day because you’re tired or bored The electric energy of a club on Saturday night The tense energy in your office just before job cuts are announced The chaotic energy of waves in a…
Everyone you meet is a Buddha. All the world is a sacred paradise. That is the tantric practice of “pure vision.” Like charnel ground, it is a “practice of view,” which means developing the habit of interpreting the world in a particular way. There are technical methods for developing this “divine…
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