featured articles random articles

• Ideas are Real
• The Death Bed Test
• Cal Newport is Wrong About Passion
• Hypercube
• Techzing Interview Tuesday March 23rd
• Transcend Your Tribe
• New Rules for Christmas
• Thief in the Labyrinthine Garden

New Posting Schedule

Since I began, I’ve stuck to a regular schedule of Monday and Friday posts, alternating between depthy essays and shorter inspirational posts. Right now I have so many exciting opportunities, many of them stemming directly from this and other writing, that I’ve decided to change the posting schedule for the summer to a biweekly one. You should still expect regular updates, and I’ll be... Read More

Goal Mapping Alpha

It’s finally ready! As promised, the alpha version of my Goal Mapping software is ready. For those of you who aren’t down with geek lingo, an “alpha version” is a complete piece of software, but it has only been tested by the developer (me), so it has loads of bugs, it’s probably ugly, and may not do everything that later version will do. For those of you who didn’t... Read More

Why you should fly Cubana

Carl Hoffman recently caught my attention by traveling the world using whatever means the local population used to travel, including rickety airplanes, dilapidated trains, and roach infested ferries. The thing that struck me about this relatively affluent American who traveled the world this way was that he just decided to do it one day. He decided to do something daring and perhaps dangerous, and he... Read More

Planning Right? You’ll Fail.

Planning Right: The Problem Imagining your future is usually right brained: your creative center generates a story for a future that could plausibly happen. It hits the highlights, and it puts magical arrows between them as if one event leads inexorably to the next. Get into MIT, start a successful company with your smart roommates, and retire early to a country that you can’t pronounce the name... Read More

The Post That Will Change Your Life

… isn’t this one. Sorry about that. I’ve been skipping my usual Friday posts for two weeks now. You might think I’m slacking, but actually I’m just expressing my inner non-communicative workaholic. Non-communicative because I should’ve warned you two and a half weeks ago, when I first planned my radio silence. I always expect things to go faster than they do. Workaholic... Read More

It’s Easy When You Do It

It’s easy to over think plans—getting caught in a cycle of thinking instead of acting. Fears and doubts loom large because they are in the present, and any positive outcome is in some far off future. In that spirit, a bit of inspiration from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (affiliate link): We walk past ski shops into a restaurant where we see on the walls huge photographs of the... Read More

Pete Michaud Techzing Interview Transcript

This is a transcript from the interview I did recently with Justin and Jason at Techzing. If you want to listen to the audio instead of reading, click here. Enjoy! Table of Contents About Pete’s Writing Retirement Preface: Ken Sharpe Hitting a Home Run Retirement: Researching the Blogs Desperate for Value Retirement: The Blogs Start and Pete Get Laid Off Ambition Starts with Thinking Small Metrics... Read More

The Short Trajectory of Prodigy

A prodigy is very young and highly skilled in whatever field they practice. The concept is demoralizing because it builds a wall separating prodigy from mortal. It’s like the superstar effect: what’s the point of even competing when you have toddlers running around juggling fire and reciting the Iliad in ancient Greek? I have good news about that though, that I’ll get to in a moment,... Read More

Transcend Your Tribe

Humans are tribal animals. We trust and mimic members of our group, while we distrust and malign outsiders. That worked 200,000 years ago, but it’s a bad strategy now, and one 1950s experiment is a fantastic case in point. In the Robber’s Cave Experiment, researchers pitted two groups of homogeneous, preteen boys against each other. The results were riveting, yet strangely unsurprising: The... Read More

Pete Michaud Techzing Interview

I had a great interview with Jason and Justin at TechZing. Click here to listen to the interview → Click here to read a transcript of the interview → We covered quite a bit of ground in the interview: The details of the business that allowed me to “retire” at 25 My business strategy and philosophy My future projects and goals My eye patch (1:30) Also mentioned Max Klein and his... Read More