Ideas are like viruses. They can hijack your mind and cause you to do dangerous things. Consider Ted Kaczynski. Despite being a brilliant math prodigy, he became convinced that the world was heading towards self-annihilation. The only solution was to return to a pre-technological, agrarian society. When his own exile from society failed, he started […]

For the last few years, I’ve been having an interest in Buddhist philosophy. The unique perspective on life often feels like it balances out some of the excesses of our achievement-driven self-improvement culture. Does that feeling change, however, if instead of being an ancient, Indian religion discovered by an ascetic named Gotama, it was instead […]

Most people think being smart is about having more facts. Trivia-shows like Jeopardy! epitomize this view of knowledge. The smartest people are the people with the most names, dates and places stored away inside their mind. This is probably the least important and useful part of learning though. Instead of facts, I’d prefer to focus […]

I spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing my life. Sometimes that’s towards optimizing to achieve some other goal—strengthen my business, get in better shape or have better relationships. However, the ultimate goal is to be happy and fulfilled, so why not optimize for that more directly? I think an easy way to optimize […]