Curiosity Chronicle

I'm often asked for advice from people just starting out in life. When I respond, I imagine I'm speaking to my 22-year-old self. Young. Energetic. Highly ambitious. But with little direction. Feeling lost. There are a handful of things I find myself consistently repeating in these responses, so I thought it would be worthwhile to collect them into a single piece. But to be clear, in writing (and r...

In an apocryphal story, legendary painter Pablo Picasso was walking through the market when a woman approached him and asked for a drawing. Picasso quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art and handed it back to her. "That'll be one million dollars," he smiled. "But Mr. Picasso, it only took you thirty seconds!" "On the contrary," he replied. "It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiec...

A six week stretch of travel had already reduced my output. Then, I got caught in an earthquake in Panama. And finally, upon returning home on little sleep, I was laid out by a bug my son brought home from school. This weekend, as I started to think about the week ahead, I noticed a familiar, building sensation. A clenching tension in my jaw and neck. A heavy drop in my shoulders. An elevated hear...

Last Wednesday, I flew to Panama to deliver two keynotes. I was excited for the trip. I’d been once before as a kid and remembered the beautiful country. I completed the first talk on Thursday evening and the second on Friday morning. I left feeling energized and headed back to the hotel to take a few calls before heading to the airport. At 12:56pm local time, I was on the top floor of my hotel wh...

Confession: I’ve never been someone who was a natural in social settings. As something of an introvert, I struggled to build new adult relationships. I often felt others weren’t responding to my social signals. In most cases, I just assumed they didn’t like me and moved on. But it turns out I was actually falling victim to a damning collision of two psychological phenomena: Signal Amplification Bi...

When I was 13 years old, a single story changed the course of my life. But to understand it, I need to take you back in time to a strange experiment from decades ago. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was studying patients who had their corpus callosum surgically severed. His experiments led him to hypothesize that the left hemisphere has a specialized system he called The Interpreter, whose respon...

Confession: I'm a routine guy. I thrive on structure. I think of routines as a way to ensure execution against the daily action that contributes to long-term, compounding progress. But there's a dark side to routines that nobody talks about. When your routines become too rigid and complicated, they become a source of stress rather than strength. The routines meant to serve you can start to own you...

In the 3rd century BCE, King Pyrrhus was preparing for an aggressive military campaign in Italy when a trusted advisor named Cineas asked him a simple question: After conquering Italy, what would they do next? Then Sicily. Then Libya and Carthage. And then? King Pyrrhus replied, "Then we will live a life of ease. Drink all day and have pleasant conversation with our friends." Cineas paused and spo...

AI is quite clearly the biggest buzzword of the year. But one thing I don't see anyone talking about is just how much AI is shifting how rewards are earned. Things are changing so rapidly that the frontier of accurate prediction has been pulled closer and closer to the present. In this new world, the rewards will be earned by those who are willing to be beginners over and over again. The value see...

Last week I wrote about failing a marathon. Six days later, at 5am, I drove back to the course alone and ran 26.25 miles in 2:48:47. Not because I needed the official result. Because when I say I'm going to do something, I do it. In this piece, I talk about seven lessons from that solo marathon that have nothing to do with running — how to stack slow progress, how to stay in the long game, and why...

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons studied the impact of the increased efficiency of coal use. The common economic intuition said that as efficiency improved, people would use less coal. Jevons argued that the economic reality was different: As technology improved the efficiency of coal use, demand for coal would increase as people created and justified new uses. It became known as...

Last Sunday, I was scheduled to run a marathon with a goal of completing the race in 2:49:59. I trained all summer for the race, building up to 70+ mile weeks. I tapered. I carb loaded. I meticulously prepared for every detail. And honestly, I was certain I’d do it. But…I failed. After 21.45 miles at a 6:24 average pace, I stopped and walked off the course. I didn’t finish. DNF. That’s not somethi...

The engineer took out an axe and slammed it into the brick wall. It was June 1896. The young man had spent months working in a small brick shed behind his rented house, only to realize, at 4am, that the door wasn't big enough for what he'd built. His name was Henry Ford. His creation, the Ford Quadricycle. His atomic insight was simple: He began viewing the factory itself as the product. While oth...

Last weekend, my family and I made our annual pilgrimage to a small community in northwest Connecticut. When I was 18 months old, my parents had rented a house there for the summer, seeking an escape from the New York City heat. The next year, we went back. The following, we went again. Soon, the tiny enclave became like a second home. I met my two best friends there. I caught my first fish there....

I first met Tim Cook in 2014. I was just starting my career in finance and had signed up for a local gym that opened at 5:00am. I started arriving at 4:45am so I could get to the office by 6:30. Each morning, there was a small handful of others who would congregate outside the doors at that time. Tim happened to be one of the people in that group. For the first six months, I talked to him almost e...

I'm convinced that the market for telling people what they want to hear is much larger than the market for telling people what they need to hear . That one fact explains a lot of what you see in the world. But my goal has always been to be real. Even if it's unpopular. Because everything I write is something I hope my son reads someday, and I owe him the truth. Today, that truth is a few things no...

Imagine two different people on the same mid-January day. One lives in California. He walks outside in shorts and a t-shirt. The warm sun beams down on his face. He puts on his sunglasses, unlocks his car, and turns the AC on full blast. One lives in New York. He walks outside in a heavy jacket. He grimaces as the cold wind hits his uncovered face. He opens the trunk of his car, takes out a brush,...

A few weeks ago, I came across a podcast clip of Conan O'Brien talking about why he doesn't pay to fly private. He likes going through the airport, chatting with people at TSA, and "being in the world with other people that are traveling." It got me thinking about the obsessive pursuit of convenience and the hidden debt it creates in your life. Money has the ability to reduce the simple stresses,...

In 1628, Sweden's mightiest warship sank less than a mile into its maiden voyage -- not because of an enemy attack, but because a king couldn't stop adding to it. I call it the Vasa Effect: the addition of individual positives can eventually create a catastrophic negative. In this week's piece, I break down why our bias for addition is holding us back and how creative subtraction might be the fast...

The seat you randomly chose on day one is the seat you'll sit in for the rest of the term. My college professor said that, and he was right -- not just about lecture halls, but about life. Your life has gravity, and most people never even feel it building. This week, I break down the two types of gravity keeping you stuck and the simple answer to making sure you can always escape. ••• This episode...

A fancy robe nearly destroyed a philosopher's life. In 1765, Denis Diderot's financial means went from meager to extravagant. Soon thereafter, he came to own a fancy scarlet dressing robe. Diderot liked the status that the fancy robe conferred on him but quickly felt the remainder of his possessions could not compare. So, in quick succession, he purchased a new leather chair. New shoes. An elabora...

Everyone's asking: how do I stand out in the AI era? A 1968 German mathematician's traffic paradox holds the answer. When everyone floods the new shortcut, the fast lane becomes the slow lane. Here's how to find the open road...  ••• This episode brought to you by: DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online.  Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial...

In the early 1900s, an aging Japanese steam train engineer named Yasoichi Hori was growing increasingly concerned about his deteriorating eyesight. Hori's job relied on his ability to quickly read small track signals at a distance while moving at a high rate of speed. The cab he worked in was at the back of the locomotive, behind a large boiler, which meant that he often had to lean out a side win...

I think I'm having a midlife crisis." That's what my friend, who I'll call Joe, said to me at dinner a few weeks ago. Joe is in his early-40s. He's had a good career on a steady rising track in the world of finance. He's married with two kids, ages 7 and 4. He lives in the suburbs outside New York and commutes into the city for work. In many respects, I think of Joe as something of an archetype of...

Why do you value the things you build yourself so much more than anything you can buy? In this episode, I share a personal story from my first apartment and break down the fascinating science behind why effort is the secret ingredient to a meaningful life. ••• This episode brought to you by: DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online.  Origin Financial -...