We might deserve something. We might be entitled to it. But expectations are a story we tell ourselves, and that story is up to us. The simple life hack is to lower your expectations, regardless of what you’re entitled to. Create the conditions for the outcome you seek, but leave yourself room if it doesn’t […]

I asked my AI about some obsolete card games, and it wrote a 1,000 word essay about Lansquenet. It made up the rules, the strategies, the betting techniques, all of it. Saying that it was raining on July 14th last year is an error. Inventing an entirely new set of rules is an hallucination. An […]

Workers have rarely gotten the long end of the stick. The seduction of “do what you’re told and you’ll win valuable prizes” often doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and so it’s not surprising that many people are skeptical about delivering something extra–work is called work for a reason. At the same time, one of the […]

It’s thrilling when someone reads our minds. Sometimes we call it hospitality, or smart user interface design. Sometimes, it simply feels like being seen. The person or the system knows what you need, perhaps before you even realize what that might be. This is a special sort of magic. It’s easy to take this for […]

Have you ever made a video that was seen by someone you didn’t know? Or written something that got shared outside of your inner circle? The odds of either of these things happening a generation ago were close to zero. Now, it’s common. The skeptics said that people wanted to watch videos, not make them. […]