Many of us spend a lot of our time at our computers. Yet how efficiently do we really use them? Memorizing the most useful keyboard commands might save you minutes a day. Here are some of the most useful ones I've found: Switch windows within a single application (Command-` on Mac)Paste while using the formatting of the document you're pasting into (Command-Option-Shift-V on Mac)Skip to next/p...

What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out! We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had w...

Are you looking for a good non-fiction book to read? Yesterday I asked people to share one of the best non-fiction books they've ever read, that may be lesser-known. The request yielded 102 unique recommendations, only 18% of which were familiar to me. Incidentally, there was very little overlap between this list and Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Best Non-Fiction Books" (found here: ht...

Here's a social characteristic that divides us that I think few people are aware of: how often, during a typical face-to-face conversation, do you pay attention to or visualize what your facial expressions must look like to the other person? I first became aware of this distinction during a conversation with friends, where we stumbled on the realization that we are very different from each oth...

Written: November 3, 2018 | Released: July 23, 2021 Here are eight common and slick-sounding claims that I think are misleading, along with a very clunky alternative for each that I think is truer and more useful: "You'll regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did" -> don't try to minimize the amount of regret you'll have - try to maximize the total amount of the things...

It's remarkable the degree to which language can paint a picture of something being good or bad, or someone being trustworthy or unreliable, without actually making any factual claims. The more aware of this you become, the more you start seeing it all over the place. Language is often not neutral and objective even when it professes to be. We all know that language can have positive or negative ...

There are a LOT of ways to make inferences. Many more, I think, than is generally realized. And they all have their weaknesses. You can make inferences using… (1) Deduction: As a consequence of the definition of X and Y, if X then Y. X applies to this case. Therefore Y. “Plato is a man, and all men are mortal; therefore Plato is mortal.” “For any number that is an integer, t...

Here is a simple technique I really like using that I think can help us (a) better understand ourselves and (b) have more say over how we react in response to our emotions. I call it the "Inner Why" technique. How to do it:When you notice a sudden change in your emotional state (e.g., you start becoming anxious, sad, frustrated, or angry), immediately give yourself the best quick explanation y...

Written: September 30, 2018 | Released: August 13, 2021 I think one of the big choices to be made in life (once basic needs are well met) is whether to try to optimize more for a life of stability or for a life of acceleration. There is a tension between these two types of lives because they imply making different decisions in many realms. From what I can tell, the significant majority of p...

I recently conducted an in-person mini-experiment on whether we can tell different beverages apart - and how much we like them (with co-organizer Hannah Vazquez). Different stations were set up, each containing small (<1oz) tasting cups of a single type of beverage (with 5-6 distinct beverages of that type, labeled A, B, C, etc. so that nobody could tell which was which). The stations wer...