It takes about 900,000 minutes to become a board-certified dermatologist. At that point, you might be very skilled and well-informed. It takes less than nine minutes to make your patient feel seen, understood and reassured. If you skip the 9 minutes, you wasted the 900,000.

Organizations and brands can choose their quadrant. It's tempting to want the best of all four, but it's going to take effort and focus. All of these terms are relative choices, not absolute judgments. Where does your offering fit in?

Visitors to your new bookstore are likely to have a phone in their pockets--they could buy a book from the competition without even walking into the shop. And diners at your funky restaurant have to pass dozens of other places to eat on their way to you. Places that are faster, more conventional and probably cheaper as well. Good, fast and cheap used to be the goals of a typical small business.

It's possible to consider the next event in our lives as something the world is trying to teach us. But it might be even more effective to realize that, whenever we choose, we can learn something from what's going on. We're not getting taught, we're choosing to learn. There's a lesson in every interaction, if we want there to be. When we choose to learn, our active participation makes a difference.

If someone with less skill and less dedication than you took over your job, could they degrade the quality of your work? It's not difficult to make a list of twenty things that could be done to make it late, expensive or defective. Here's the hard question: If someone with more skill and dedication took over your work, how many ways could they make it better?

If there was a website you could visit to find out what the future held, how often would you visit it? We do that with the weather, sometimes daily. People are drawn to breaking news and social media buzz because they have an urge to know the now, which is a bit like the future, except it already happened. One alternative is to spend that time and energy inventing the future instead. There are countless things we can do today to change tomorrow.

It's difficult to spend the entire day working on outcomes. Sooner or later, there are tasks to be done, tasks we believe will get us to the outcome we seek. But it's easy to spend the whole day on tasks, failing to recalibrate and ignoring the fact that the tasks might not be helping us get the results we set out to create in the first place.

It's easy to believe we have an accurate understanding of ourselves. After all, we spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. It might be worth wondering about why the mirror is deemed to be accurate at reflecting what we see as our flaws, real or metaphorical, but indistinct and a little fuzzy when we consider our opportunities, assets and contributions.

So many options, so little time. A friend asked if he should put his podcast on YouTube. After all, that's how many people are consuming this sort of content, it's low cost. The comments and subscriptions offer interesting tools for engagement, and it could grow their base. But just because something might be worth doing, that doesn't mean you should.

Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn't about quality, suitability or performance. Luxury isn't a more accurate watch or a faster processor. Luxury is a marker that we can afford to do something others might consider wasteful.

Enrico Fermi found a paradox: If there's intelligent life on other planets, why haven't we heard from them yet? Perhaps the answer is this: Any civilization sufficiently advanced to travel great distances will have to work in community. This pro-social behavior, combined with the tech they develop, will inevitably lead to some sort of social media. And once social media arrives, the civilization will struggle to survive.

Even though it's possible to design an oral thermometer that measures body temperature to a hundredth of a degree, there's no reason to do so. In fact, 98.6 is overkill. 98 is enough information. More digits don't give us more information, they simply distract or confuse us. The same is true for time. Knowing what happened in a one-second snapshot interval is useful for judging a horse race, but hardly interesting if we're measuring interest in a new Broadway show. Just because we can add more digits doesn't mean that it's significant. We can intentionally ask for less.

A powerful metaphor from a long hike: Every hiker is intimately aware of their backpack. They picked it out, choosing from dozens of options. They know which straps are loose and which are digging into their skin. They can tell you if it's lopsided, and what is in each pocket. And yet... Even after days on the trail, they probably couldn't tell you a thing about anyone else's backpack.

Most people do the obvious thing, that's why we call it obvious. A new product, idea or technology is rarely obvious, at least at first. So the work of scale is to be seen as inevitable. The stepwise process of becoming the obvious choice. Skipping steps requires insisting that we're the obvious choice, but that rarely works. Instead, we work to create the conditions for others to decide that we are.

Create a document, several pages long, that explains who you are. What sort of learner are you? Do you have degrees or expertise? What sort of change are you making, who works with you, what are your standards? How do you want to engage? Periodically, upload the doc to the chat you're having with an LLM. Let it know you're offering a reminder of how you want to work together.

If you want to make a change (or make a living) it might pay to find a topic that people hesitate to talk about. There's enormous leverage in making the uncomfortable urgent enough to take action on. One of the easiest ways to improve public health and reduce cancer is by increasing the adoption of colonoscopies. No scientific breakthrough is needed, just a cultural shift.

There's "regular luck" and "earned luck." When a stranger dies and leaves you $10,000,000, that's regular luck. Undeserved, unearned, a bolt out of the blue. Someone is going to win the lottery and might be you. The other sort of luck happens after a lot of focus and effort. This is the third novel that becomes a bestseller, or the hard work that turns into a promotion to VP of sales.

Friendship is part of it, but it's mutual forward motion that transforms a group. The shared journey and mutual respect of a cohort can change the arc of our work and our lives. When we're in sync, we can find the courage to build something important. Fifteen years ago, I ran a three-day seminar in my office for about 12 women.

For many of us in the industrialized world, happiness is directly related to how big the container is. Overflowing vs. skimpy. Adequate vs. generous. Overloaded vs. slack to spare. We know that making the plate smaller helps us appreciate what we're served. Get the bucket size right and your life changes. This is probably the easiest, fastest and most productive way to improve our well being.

There's more software available for free than ever before, and a lot of it is really good. Handmade by real people, for real people. If we're going to pay for it, it needs to be extraordinary. For the last few years, I've been using Superhuman, which costs me about a dollar a day. Even if you don't use email as much as I do, I think you'll find that it's a bargain.

A problem without a solution isn't a problem, it's a situation we have to live with. But most existing problems do have solutions. We just don't like that solution. The solution might be challenging, or feel risky, or lead to an outcome we're not happy about. It's tempting to announce that this means the problem is unsolvable. It's not. It's just not an easy or low-cost solution.

It doesn't happen all at once. And it doesn't work suddenly. A home pressure cooker doesn't use more electricity than a hot pot. And it isn't as fast as a microwave. Instead, it builds up over time, producing results with a surprisingly small amount of effort. We're impatient, and so we don't consistently apply pressure when we have the chance, and we often crumple under pressure when it arrives. Consistent, gradual and persistent are the unsung forces of cultural change.

We talk about networks but we are rarely clear about what we mean. A specific sort of network is the grid, and even that idea is complicated by two competing meanings. There's the benign and powerful grid of peer-to-peer connection. Culture is built on this grid. This is friends, neighbors, co-workers and people who find and engage with each other without a central authority.

It's easy to come to the conclusion that people with means and high cultural status choose things that are better. Organic vegetables instead of junk food. But there's a long history of traditionally high-status cultural roles embracing demonstrably un-good choices. Things like bound feet, fox hunting, absinthe or cruise ships. It's hard to acknowledge that a choice we make isn't a good one. But it might be, even if it raises our status.

"I'm applying to work at Disney, do you know anyone who can give me a reference..." "My two partners and I are planning a new company, can we ask you for feedback on our business plan before we go out to raise a seed round?" "We're moving to Centerville, which neighborhood should we consider?" "Which famous college should I apply to?"