featured articles random articles

• 5 Steps to Stop Procrastinating Forever
• Conway’s Game of Life
• Life as a Geoboard
• Hack the World: A Conspiracy of None
• Silence Your God
• Meaningful Work
• Benevolent Sun
• Loss Aversion Bias

Don’t You Dare Waste Your Fucking Time

Gabrielle Bouliane, the woman in this video, was diagnosed with stage four cancer and died on January 29th, 2010. Funny how death washes away the... Read More

Content Survey Results

I let the poll run for two weeks, got plenty of responses, and the results are in. What kind of content do you want to see? Getting Your Mind Right: 50% Productivity Tools: 0% Building Income: 50% I’m planning some “Building Income” posts for the near future, look for them. I’m still going to publish some stuff about productivity, but it’ll be put on the back burner for... Read More

Meaningful Work

Last week I published an essay called Achievement Porn in which I warned against the dangers of addictive treadmills sinking their hooks into your ape brain and its greedy dopamine receptors. My goal for that essay was to encourage people to reevaluate their activities, and enable them to make a deliberate decision about how they spend their lives and why. A lot of people told me it was the wake up call... Read More

Achievement Porn

Hacker News pointed me to an article recently called “Addicted to Fake Achievement“. That article is about video games, but this one isn’t. The thesis of that article is that some games (it mentions Role Playing Games) don’t actually require skill, just time. You start with a weak character and perform some task that’s almost too easy to fail. You’re rewarded by... Read More

Pete Michaud Content Survey

The survey is closed! See the Survey Results... Read More

Life as a Geoboard

Self sabotage is a complicated subject that could fill its own series if not its own blog. Who does it? Why do we do it? What triggers it? How do we do it? I want to give you an intuitive mental model of one type of sabotage before hitting you with statistics and data from academic literature, so here’s a primer. Life as a Geoboard One aspect of self sabotage is that we have competing needs and... Read More

Hack the World: A Conspiracy of None

Introduction What I’m about to tell you is part of the painful slashing and burning you need to undertake in order to live an authentic life. It’s maybe the most important essay I’ve ever written. It’s longer than usual (around 2600 words), but if this idea is new to you, it might change your life. It certainly changed mine. The society into which you were born has socialized you to believe to... Read More

Your Reality is an Illusion

We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks.N. David Mermin “Reality is an illusion.” Even to myself I sound like a drooling hippy, but the difference between the hippy and me is that I know that it’s an illusion and they are just repeating something that sounds deep. I want to correct that by writing a few things about how reality works versus how we think... Read More

It’s Just a Ride

Taking a brief break from our regularly scheduled bloviation, I want to share this video. It’s part of deceased comedian Bill Hicks’ routine. It’s maybe the most important message there is. Here’s the video, followed by a transcript: The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds... Read More

5 Steps to Stop Procrastinating Forever

Obvious truth #1: We think about the things we like to do, and those things make us feel happy. As a result, we do those things whenever we can. Obvious truth #2: We try not to think about the things we don’t like to do. Those things make us feel frustrated, stressed, bored–anything but happy. As a result, we avoid doing those things whenever we can. I’m going to teach you how to use... Read More