Articles: 304

Words: 345,779

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How to Become World-Class at Anything
When I was 16, I performed relatively poorly in my GCSE exams, exams which every kid in the UK takes. Having missed most of my classes, and barely studied, I received a D in math and an F for French…
11 min read | 42K claps | Audio version available
Republished: Business Insider | Mentioned: University of Reading News and Attack The front
I spent all of my millions. This is what I learned
I have written about how I became a multi-millionaire at 27, and what that taught me. I was at a meditation retreat recently, when it became clear to me that I had to write this story about how I…
19 min read | 3.4K claps
Republished: NY OBSERVER | Mentioned: Bloomberg
Multi-millionaire at 27. What I learned.
In the early two-thousands, I was an early employee at a Silicon Valley technology company that designs and markets cutting-edge computer processing chips. When I started, there were a few dozen…
16 min read | 2.7K claps
Republished: CNBC make it and translated into Russian
How to Learn Anything
Even though I almost failed my school exams at age 16, I turned my life around and went on to get a bachelor’s degree (BEng) in electronic engineering, a master of science (MS) in electrical…
15 min read | 2.5K claps
Medium curated under EDUCATION
How I Rewired My Brain to Be Ultra-Social
I’ve always been an introvert. As a kid, I spent many solitary hours taking things apart to figure out how they worked, making things with the limited resources that were available (like legos…
9 min read | 2.1K claps
Medium curated under PSYCHOLOGY
I Almost Died. This Is What I Learned
This is an epic recounting of what happened when I was suddenly hospitalized with a rare condition, what the medical staff did, what the homeless and drug addicts did, and how I handled all of it.
26 min read | 1.6K claps
How to avoid a carb crash (and other productivity hacks)
You know that feeling you get between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. every day, that tired feeling where you don’t want to do anything? You want to lie down and sleep, but you have to work, or at least you have…
7 min read | 1.5K claps
What Standup Comedy Taught Me About Public Speaking and Life
A few years ago I went through a period of intense training and practice in standup comedy. I took a 12-week course in the UK, and then I started performing regularly, both in the UK and in the San…
22 min read | 975 claps | Audio version available
The Value of Incompetence
At work, I meet with a different person for lunch every day. I also usually have one-on-one meetings with one or two other people throughout the day. All of my lunches are scheduled out until…
6 min read | 851 claps
Medium curated under PSYCHOLOGY WORK
How to Sleep Like a Boss
As a teenager, I often stayed up all night watching TV, and then I slept when I was supposed to be in class. I got depressed, I was failing academically, and I was struggling to maintain supportive…
8 min read | 793 claps
Medium curated under LIFESTYLE
You Can Become Whatever You Choose
A couple of days ago, I was presenting a research poster at a machine learning conference called ScaledML. Large groups of people were gathering around my poster while I delivered ad-hoc summaries of…
6 min read | 502 claps
Medium curated under WORK
How to Know What You Want and How to Get It
I recently had lunch with a friend and colleague. He’s early in his engineering career, a young father, eager, innocent, and intelligent. He came to me with the same question that most people have…
5 min read | 487 claps
Why I Never Work Weekends
It’s Saturday and I just signed-off an email to a customer by adding, “Now I’m going to write an article about how I never work on weekends.” I guess it’s more true to say that I hardly ever work on…
10 min read | 460 claps
Medium curated under SELF WORK
STOP: The Counter-Intuitive Secret to Success
We read and hear so much about how to be more productive and efficient, and to stay motivated, and to do more. Gary Vaynerchuk tells us to always “hustle,” to sleep less than six hours per night, and…
3 min read | 438 claps
How to Rubber Duck Debug Your Life
We get blocked in life, and not only when trying to write. We get blocked when there is something that needs to be made conscious and expressed that is held inside and not allowed out. When we’re…
4 min read | 415 claps
Medium curated under WRITING MINDFULNESS
I achieve my goals daily, and it’s easy. Here’s how.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to have, do, and be, whatever you choose. You going to have an experience of what I’m talking about while reading this article, and you’re going to gain a…
10 min read | 412 claps
Your Superpower Is Also Your Kryptonite
My superpower is the ability to work really, really hard. I have incredible persistence and work ethic. This has served me well. I’ve made millions of dollars, and achieved some pretty impressive…
5 min read | 395 claps
What Is the Lifestyle Challenge?
It’s the eve of the new year. Tomorrow will be 2017. I’m on day 118 of this lifestyle challenge and I realized that there are some things about it that I have not yet explained. A lot of people have…
3 min read | 367 claps
Life Is Amazing, but for No One
I was having a conversation with a friend recently about “setting intentions.” I revealed that I have been increasingly losing faith in the belief that there is any free-will and choice. I tried to…
3 min read | 357 claps
Medium curated under SELF
Why I’ve Started Unfriending and Blocking People
I used to pride myself for never unfriending anyone on Facebook. I just wouldn’t do it. I wanted to show that I would reject no one, that I was perfectly inclusive. When things got really out of…
3 min read | 341 claps
I’m wealthier than ever. Here’s how.
I am painfully introverted. I’m also a workaholic. I can go days, or even weeks, without talking with another person. I dislike being in large groups of people, and much prefer being with just one…
13 min read | 304 claps
Networking for No Reason
I usually have one-on-one lunch meetings booked for weeks, if not months, into the future. Most of the people I have lunch with work at the same company as me, but sometimes I invite people from…
3 min read | 281 claps
Medium curated under RELATIONSHIPS WORK
You don’t need therapy. You need lifestyle.
I’ve provided about 3,500 hours of supervised psychotherapy. I’ve also had around 1,000 hours of psychotherapy myself. The conclusion I came to at the end of my pre-doctoral internship is that most…
5 min read | 228 claps
How to Make People Laugh
This is a compact guide to making people laugh in everyday life. This guide is going to teach you how to add real and effective humor to your work meetings, to your presentations, and to your dates…
7 min read | 224 claps
I succeeded by following the path of least resistance
My wife recently gave me a piece of driftwood with a quote from David Foster Wallace laser-engraved into it. It reads, “Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer…
5 min read | 220 claps
When Work Is Play
I’ve been noticing how I experience work as play. Throughout the day, I keep a list of things to do, which I then get to check-off as they are completed. If I think of something that I could or…
3 min read | 217 claps
Give Up. You’re Never Going to Arrive
A few nights ago, I was mentoring a younger version of myself. He’s about 15 years younger than me, and driven, and wanting to make a name for himself in the world. When he started at the company…
2 min read | 208 claps
My Struggle with Impostor Syndrome
I sat in the meeting room filled with other engineers and stared at the projection screen. Like a newborn child, I couldn’t understand most of what I was looking at or hearing. I recognized almost…
11 min read | 207 claps
Return From a Ten-Year Vacation
I’ve often thought that my life would make an epic, roller-coaster ride of a novel … for accountants. So, I took a ten-year vacation. It just seems like such a boring thing to write about, like how I…
10 min read | 195 claps
Chosen by Medium's curators for further distribution
The Law of Attraction Is Simple
I was driving to Mount Shasta in California with my wife, Cindy, in the back and our friend, Dave, in the passenger seat. Dave and I talked about a lot of things, including The Work of Byron Katie…
3 min read | 171 claps
Mentioned: Empowerment
Think Before Doing
I’m going to tell you about a powerful idea that keeps showing up for me. This idea has helped me enormously in my life. In a nutshell, we often get stuck not knowing what to do because we don’t…
FEATURED ON MEDIUM
8 min read | 169 claps
Medium curated under SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PRODUCTIVITY
Republished: The Coach
How to Always Crush a Job Interview
I have a fresh, alive, and powerful conversation with with at least one person every day. I have all my lunches at work scheduled out for months. I have breakfast meetings, coffee meetings, and…
3 min read | 168 claps
Medium curated under WORK
The Principles by Which I Live My Life
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been having a conversation about politics with some friends on Facebook. That sounds like a bad idea, I know. One of these friends, who identifies as extremely…
3 min read | 167 claps
How to Respond to Bullies
In this article, I’m going to instruct you on how to respond to bullies. First of all, we need to define what a bully is. If you witness someone trying to get others to do things by threatening them…
4 min read | 163 claps
Mental Discipline Is Foundational for Mental Health
According to the data from my Garmin watch, I awoke at 3:28 am last night. I can also see that I had the night’s first short burst of REM (dreaming) sleep only a few minutes earlier, starting at 3:15…
6 min read | 153 claps
Chosen by Medium's curators for further distribution
What Newly-Minted Millionaires Struggle With
I’ve written about what I learned from suddenly becoming a multi-millionaire at twenty-seven, and what I learned from gradually spending all of it in mid-life retirement. I have many friends who…
5 min read | 141 claps
On Hacker News
How I Learned to Invest (Part 1)
I made millions of dollars from being an early employee of NVIDIA, the company that develops the GPUs that are accelerating the current AI-revolution. Though it’s now the eighth largest company in…
9 min read | 140 claps
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How We Limit Ourselves by Placing Gurus on Pedestals
I traveled to India, principally to sit with a renowned guru and to receive initiation from him. Every day for three weeks, I went to his concrete home in Benares, the spiritual heart of India, where…
4 min read | 129 claps
The Ultimate Potential of Healthy Masculinity
I’m on a plane flying back to San Jose, California from Houston, Texas. My small, blue fishing rod is in the overhead bin. A couple of days ago, on a small boat, I was piercing a hook through the…
6 min read | 125 claps
This Is Not Your Dad’s Org Chart
I was sitting in the reclining leather chair in my therapist’s office receiving support with some struggles I’ve been having at work. I told her that even though we tell the story that the company…
5 min read | 118 claps
The Law of Attraction Only Works When You Don’t Need It
I was in a live conversation today on a podcast show where we were talking about setting intentions for the new year. The show seemed to go a little off-track, and some yelling happened (including…
4 min read | 110 claps
My Struggle with Complex PTSD
Since returning from a psilocybin-assisted retreat in Jamaica, many aspects of my life have begun to shift. Not only has there been massive changes in my family, with issues going back thirty years…
5 min read | 106 claps
Chosen by Medium's curators for further distribution
What’s Happening Is Never a Problem
What’s happening is always simply what’s happening. It’s always completely manageable. Problems don’t arise in what is happening, except as concepts about the past or the future, which are themselves…
2 min read | 104 claps
I’m antifragile as fnck. Please break me.
This is a story about me and my friend up-leveling our careers, about him becoming a React Native developer, and about me becoming a world-class expert in AI. It’s a story of reciprocal inspiration…
13 min read | 99 claps
What I See as Effective Coaching
A coaching session is something that tends to happen when I reach a point in my life at which I realize that I’ve been trying to get to some new level of performance or success and that to get there…
2 min read | 93 claps
Day 60: The Dirt IS the Gold
I’ve completed day 60 of this lifestyle challenge. As I have written about in earlier articles and posts, I feel consistent energy and mental clarity from when I awake until I go to bed, I sleep…
5 min read | 90 claps
Some Thoughts About the Law of Attraction
Here are some thoughts that I recently recorded to share with my son as I introduce him to the law of attraction. I am hoping that he, you, I, we all can learn to utilize the law of attraction more…
5 min read | 83 claps
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What I Love About Ice Baths
The nurse took the temperature under my tongue. "Your temperature if 93°F! That’s not good," She said. Normal body temperature is 98.6F. The life-threatening emergency medical condition known as…
7 min read | 82 claps
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How to Develop a Winning Mindset
I support many people in becoming more successful in life. While I’ve taught many practical skills (such as organization), I have also come to realize that perhaps the most impactful factor is…
6 min read | 74 claps
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How I Write Every Day While Working Full-Time
A while back, a person that I was coaching revealed that he thought that I was a full-time writer. Then yesterday, a friend at work asked me how I was able to write so much while working full-time…
4 min read | 67 claps
How I Keep My Inboxes Empty
Having an empty inbox, or achieving "inbox zero" as some people refer to it, seems to be a holy grail, a mythical situation that is unattainable in the real world, a hypothetical freedom only…
12 min read | 60 claps
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How Scientific Breakthroughs Work
I have a good friend and colleague who is a very accomplished engineering leader. During lunch yesterday, he told me a story about how he solved what at first seemed to be an extraordinarily…
5 min read | 58 claps
He Beat My Brother with a Spade While I Did My Engineering Job
I’ve struggled with procrastination all my life and now my 18-year-old son is struggling with it too. I was on the phone with him for five hours yesterday, loving every second of our time together…
9 min read | 55 claps
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The Good Person’s Guide to Kicking Ass
There’s a reason that we see so many corrupt people in positions of power and authority. It’s not because they’re particularly competent. They’re not there because they do a good job. The reason they…
9 min read | 52 claps
How I Finally Quit Smoking and How to Change Any Behavior
I was at university and I had been smoking cigarettes for years. I was exercising most days and I had begun to notice that my level of fitness seemed to be capped by the smoking. My body and…
3 min read | 43 claps
Why Self-Directed Investors Can Massively Outperform Professional Money Managers (part 1)
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve revealed to you how I learned to invest (see part one and part two). Now I wish to address a topic that often comes up in discussions about investing. The person…
8 min read | 40 claps
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What CrossFit Has Given Me
I’ve been doing CrossFit four about six years now. I used to train five or six days per week. More recently, while recovering from illness, I have been training about three times per week. Here are…
2 min read | 36 claps
How I Learned to Invest (part 2)
This is a follow-on to part one, from last week, in which I covered my path into, and through, index investing. This week, I’ll explain how I became a more capable and sophisticated investor. After…
7 min read | 36 claps
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Day 84: Strategies and Tactics
It’s really important and valuable for me to be aware of, and pay attention to, both my strategies and my tactics. My systematic strategic thinking is currently most apparent in the creation and…
2 min read | 33 claps
How to Lose Friends and Manipulate People (Don’t Do These Things)
In today’s world, people rarely ask me how they can effectively alienate everyone around them. It’s one thing to be truly and deeply successful, happy, and fulfilled, but who wants that, when you can…
4 min read | 30 claps
Why Self-Directed Investors Can Massively Outperform Professional Money Managers (part 2)
Hi! You might want to begin by reading part one, if you haven’t already. Now, let’s get right back into looking at even more asymmetries that favor the self-directed investor over professional money…
8 min read | 30 claps
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What I Learned from My Dream Job Interview
I don’t know how it happened, but I was interviewing with a senior vice president (SVP) in the company where I currently work. I don’t remember what the role was, but I think it was in a…
5 min read | 21 claps
My Resolution: Fewer Resolutions
I’ve been doing this lifestyle challenge now for four months, and I’ve learned a lot about what motivates me from the process. Last month I had a row entitled, “Bed before 10 pm.” I almost never put…
4 min read | 13 claps
I Can Finally Ask For What I Need Without Feeling Ashamed
This morning, Cindy and I went to a Korean spa. We each got scrubbed vigorously with salt and then deeply massaged. After that, we began our relaxing cycles of hot, dry sauna followed by immersion in…
7 min read | 13 claps
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On Being Imperfect
It’s Christmas Day, and I’m on day 112 of my lifestyle challenge. This past month has been, how do you say, different. Taking a look at this month’s chart and comparing it with the previous three…
2 min read | 11 claps
Problem Solving
Every day I use a brain training app called Peak. I’ve been gradually increasing my scores and noticing improvements in other areas of my life, which I believe may be related to the training. The…
2 min read | 6 claps
Little Blue Crosses
Morning pages is one of the life bootstrapping practices that I have been using. I have a stack of sheets from doing morning pages for the past six months. It’s something that I have created…
2 min read | 5 claps
Day 34: Goal Setting
Some people tell me that I have experienced a lot of success in my life. I understand that this “success” is the result of goals that I set in the past. I once wrote down that I would be a “world…
4 min read | 1 clap
Day 40: Success is a Dynamic Bell Curve
I’ve been tracking and improving a lot of things recently, from my time under a cold shower, to the amount of water I’m drinking. One of the things I’ve noticed is that when I have a clear goal, and…
4 min read