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 re-reading it), it's obvious to me that this advice applies to all of us. At any age. On any life path.

So, strap...

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 masterpiece in thirty seconds."

This story is a perfect example of a modern crisis I'm starting to see in the AI...

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 heart rate.

It got me thinking about how to find your way out of the land of overwhelm when the pile...

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 when I started to feel a light rumbling sensation in my chair.

But then, chaos. Th...

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:

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 responsibility is to find clear cause and effect.

Its job is simple: To take scattered, seemingly random data and facts about the world in front of you and...

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.

This is where my 90-10 Rule comes in:

90% disciplined compliance.
10% open flexibility.

90...

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 spoke: "But what's stopping us from doing that today?"

The story is one of the oldest documented cases of the Arrival Fallacy: the false...

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 seems likely to accrue to those who can combine curiosity and a beginner's mindset with bias for...

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 showing up through the valley is the whole game...

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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 Jevons Paradox: technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a given resource lead to a rise in the consumption of that resource.

I think the most interesting application of Jevons Paradox...

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 something you read in newsletters or see on social media every day. It’s all about wins. Succ...

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 others obsessed over the car, he obsessed over the factory. By the early 1920s, Ford owned an extraordinary 60% of...

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 had my first crush there.

But perhaps most importantly, I played my first game of catch...

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 every day and had exactly zero idea who he was.

<...

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 nobody told you about success.

It may not be...

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, and starts cleaning the snow and ice off his windshield.

Which one do you assume is...

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, burdens, and inconveniences of adult life. But there's a certain level of inconvenience that's an important part of the human experience.<...

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 fastest way to improve.

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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.

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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 elaborate wooden desk.

All of which seemed appropriately matched to his lovely scarlet robe.

Or, perhaps more important, appropriately matched to the...

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... 

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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 window to catch the signals coming up on the track ahead.

In the small, cramped cab, it was just Hori and his...

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 the dream. Good job. Good family. Good life.

So, naturally, his words...

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.

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"So, what's your 5-year plan?"

That was the question posed to me by a mentor in January 2021. At the time, I was about seven years into my career, on the "track" in finance.

Climbing slowly up the mountain, I had started to wonder if it was the wrong one. I just didn't seem to have the same energy for the work as most of my colleagues.

All of the future mountains I envisioned were (at most) one degree of separation from the mountain I'd been climbing.

As I...

On January 27, 1986, just 16 hours before the Space Shuttle Challenger was set to launch, an engineer named Roger Boisjoly presented data showing a catastrophic risk with the shuttle's O-rings in cold temperatures.

His warnings were overruled. The next morning, 73 seconds into its flight, the Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew aboard.

Sociologist Diane Vaughn coined the term Normalization of Deviance to describe what had happened—not a single moment of negligence, but a slow, systemic drift where unacceptable practices became accepted because they were repeated without immediate consequences.

In this episode, I ex...

I’m increasingly convinced that the willingness to change your mind is the ultimate sign of intelligence.

The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information or evidence. It's not that they lack conviction in their beliefs, but more so that they've developed enough self-awareness to understand what it would take to change them.

The world will pressure you to stubbornly resist such change. To cling to every belief as though it might be your last. But there's immense power in resisting that pressure.

I...

Last week, I ​wrote a piece​ about reinvention. Specifically, the myth of too late and how to reinvent your life at any age or life stage.

It clearly struck a chord.

I received thousands of replies in the days following the piece. One reader reply referenced a two-decade-old newspaper advice column segment that had resonated on the subject.

Me being me, I decided to try to find the column. After all, if something was still etched into my reader's memory 20+ years later, it must have been good.

​I did​...

In colonial India, a bounty on cobras was supposed to reduce the snake population. Instead, people started breeding cobras for profit — and when the policy ended, they released thousands into the streets. The result? More cobras than ever. 

This is Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And it's not just a business problem — it's happening in your life right now. 

From sleep scores to morning routines to money, the things we measure can quietly start to own us. Here's how to spot it and fix it...

There’s an old children’s fable I recently retold to my son about a farmer whose wagon wheel gets stuck in the mud.

He calls on Hercules to come to his aid. Hercules appears, but rather than lifting the wagon, he speaks: "Do you think you can move the wagon by simply looking at it? Put your shoulder to the wheel."

The farmer did so, and the wagon lurched forward as the wheel easily came unstuck.

The simple read says this is a story about effort. But it’s also a...

Every single week, I invariably get a handful of emails from readers around the world with a similar general message.

Stuck on a path. Living a life they didn’t really choose. Scared it’s too late to make a change.

Given the frequency of these messages, I decided it warranted a deeper, more tactical guide.

Here’s exactly how I would approach reinvention (at any age or life stage):

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Have you ever noticed that growth feels like destruction?

That getting better feels like getting worse?

You're not doing something wrong. You're just experiencing something nobody told you about...

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There’s a beautiful Zen parable that goes something like this:

A man is walking across a field when a tiger leaps out from the trees and runs toward him.

Fearing for his life, the man sprints away but quickly halts at a steep cliff. Facing a terrifying drop, with the tiger bearing down on him, he grabs hold of a single vine and lowers himself over the cliff’s edge.

Looking up, he sees the tiger above. Looking down, he notices another tiger pacing on the ground below. And to m...

My son just turned four. One of the things I love most about the age is the unbridled curiosity with which he explores the world.

He's deep in the classic "why" phase, taking me down explanatory rabbit holes that go long past my point of comfort.

But one of the most interesting prompts he asked recently was this one:

"Tell me all about zippers."

On any given day, zipper is replaced by some basic thing that we interact with. It might be tell me all about our...

A few years ago, as part of the research for my ​first book​, I asked a group of centenarians for the advice they'd most like to give to their younger selves.

One of them offered this piece of wisdom:

Those lies dilute your attention, pull you toward distractions, and cut into your confidence. They give you an easy out when the truth requires more painful accountability.

Those lies keep you from running at full...

In 2004, a Finnish-American photographer named Arno Minkkinen gave the commencement speech at the New England School of Photography.

In the speech, he offered a powerful thought experiment:

Imagine for a moment that you find yourself at the large bus station in the center of Helsinki.

There are two dozen platforms at the station, each with several different bus lines departing from them bound for a wide array of destinations outside the city.

Each of the different bus lines departing from a given platform follows the same route...

In 1918, German theoretical physicist Max Planck won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of energy quanta.

After winning the prize, he went on a tour, giving lectures at universities and institutions around the country on his findings.

There’s an apocryphal story from that tour that I first came across while reading the transcript of Charlie Munger’s 2007 commencement speech at USC Law School.

Max Planck’s chauffeur, after having heard Planck practice and deliver the talk so many times, had the entire thing memorized.

He jokingly asked...

"No unforced errors."

At a recent speaking event, I was asked by an audience member to share one piece of advice I wish I could tell my younger self.

Specifically, they asked for the non-obvious advice I've found most difficult to internalize and live by, despite knowing its importance.

My response:

No unforced errors.

Three words. And I've spent years learning why they're so hard to live by...

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Most people end the day exhausted but can't point to a single thing they meaningfully moved forward.

The problem isn't how much you're working -- it's the type of work filling your hours.

In this piece, I break down a simple framework that fundamentally changed how I work: The Four Types of Professional Time...

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