Could productivity be a bad thing? I had a podcast interview about Ultralearning recently where the host asked if being productive might be overrated. Working all the time, striving for ever-more efficiency, aggressive efforts to get more done, maybe chasing productivity isn’t the answer? I couldn’t disagree more. Productivity features a lot in my writing […]

Few things are as unpleasant as anxiety. With the explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation and books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I’m hardly alone in wanting to worry less. Recently, I read Anxious by NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux is an expert on a lot of the neural processes behind […]

In early Top Performer pilots (before we even called it Top Performer) Cal and I made a fairly subtle mistake about the process of acquiring career skills. It’s one I’ve seen many people make when thinking about improving their career, so I think it’s worth exploring here in case you might be making it too. […]

Sometimes the obvious advice you need to hear isn’t obvious to you. Here’s an example of this that happened just last week. A guy on Twitter asked me if I did coaching. He felt stuck in his career and wanted to pay me to give him advice. I don’t do individual coaching (at least for […]