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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Equivocation Cripples Action

Readers frequently give me a hard time about some edge case in my writing as if I haven’t thought the subject through, and pared the word count down by half. I’m confident that those readers don’t write a whole lot. If they did write, they would realize that in order to produce a cogent...

Techzing Interview Tuesday March 23rd

TechZing, “News and views from the front-line of tech & startups”, was crazy enough to invite me to do an interview tomorrow at 6:30pm EST. I’m not sure when it will be available for listening, but I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s up. We’ll be talking about my...